I'M NOT PSYCHIC BUT MY LYRICS ARE

Around this time, the people running the door at Cake Shop wouldn’t allow any more people in—the basement had reached capacity. Near the bathroom, 24-year-old Max Steele, a hipster with a mop of red curly hair who was stripped down to nothing but a pair of black briefs, was waiting in an impossible line.
“Gays love a recession because we hate the capitalist economy that’s found in the hetero-normative patriarchy anyways,” said the young man, a law-firm drone by day and a performer and go-go dancer by night. “I say burn the motherfucker down! Right? Fuck Prop 8! Who gives a fuck? We should burn down Wall Street and take over New York.”
He took a sobering breath.
“Gays are the only people with dispensable money—dispensable income or whatever?” he said, telling us he was a Sarah Lawrence grad. “Well, not for me personally.”
So we wondered what he was doing out.
“I’m like $60,000 in debt from school,” he said. “I’m fucked anyway.” 

New York Observer, Feb 2009.

"The recession hasn’t directly affected my art, because I never really made money from it to begin with, and that’s never been the point, and that’s not how I measure success (thank goodness!). However, the cultural shift around the recession has, I think, made it a very interesting time to make art. We’re in a period in America of having to take a hard look at what we value– and our country doesn’t provide much support for art, either institutionally or socially, though of course we very much value the art itself. I actually went and saw Courtney Love speak at the Guggenheim last weekend, and she talked a lot about how artists are more valuable dead than alive, and to simultaneously want to be an artist and want to be alive (and have a good life) are sort of contradictory impulses. I think the recession has emphasized this." 

Interview with SLC Speaks, January 2012.