Finding the Muse explores the lives of a group of aspiring fine artists from the mid-1960s, when they completed art school, to the mid-1980s, focusing especially on problems of artistic creativity as they relate to such issues as the mystique of the artist, the challenge of establishing community among artists, the place of the art market in the construction of artistic identity, and the limits and possibilities of modern and postmodern art itself. By identifying the salient problems of contemporary artistic activity, the author seeks both to reconstruct more optimal conditions of creativity and to provide direction for how these conditions might be brought about.