You have to do your work, believe in your work, find a close friend-base that believes in you and your work, have "them" for support, and say "Fuck You!"
"Fuck you" to whom? To those who don't like your work? Does he care about what the others think or not? Does he only care about what other musicians have to say maybe? (That would make sense to me)
In a pre-concert interview at Miller Theater (NYC), Zorn literally claimed that a great piece of art says "fuck you!" It's quite a different model than, say, art as "communication." He seems quite ready to offend or disappoint - as long as he is making himself happy first and foremost. (I wonder if any of his voluminous output makes him unhappy in retrospect. I wouldn't be surprised if he had trouble even remembering some of his projects.) Zorn is interesting and appealing because he does seem totally unfiltered and honest, and on the surface he seems to not care what anybody thinks. If you told him you couldn't stand a particular record he made he'd probably say something like "then don't listen to it." This is an appealing image of freedom - freedom for the artist, freedom for the audience. But of course, you have to be particularly successful or antisocial to *afford* this kind of freedom. HowEVER, he must care on some level when it comes to how he is represented as a person -- I would guess that all the controversy in the 80s with Asian-American groups had to have hurt him somehow. (And, given that mess, which ultimately I think was a bunch of PC shit, I don't blame him for being skittish.) In the film he says something to that effect, that an interview "is not him." (He's also said that his pieces are not him.) Who knows, maybe Heuermann faxed him one question that put up his defenses, and thus we have Bookshelf and not something else. Actually, Zorn is one of the few artists I really like who I'll personally forgive for not pleasing me. As for the film, Heuermann gave me enough to stay off my shit list, but I'm not going to start obsessively following her around either.