And why making with or without it takes courage:

You're expected to make art that's intimately (perhaps even painfully) personal — yet alluring and easily grasped by an audience that has likely never known you personally.

When the work goes well, we keep such inner distractions at bay, but in times of uncertainty or need, we begin listening. We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance and approval we seek. For students in academic settings, this trouble is a near certainty; you know (and you are correct) that if you steer your work along certain paths, three units of "A" can be yours. Outside academia, approval may be clothed in loftier terms — critical recognition, shows, fellowships — but the mechanism remains the same.

With commercial art this issue is often less troublesome since approval from the client is primary, and other rewards appropriately secondary. But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?