How To Promote Your Art.
1) Bash your head against indifference for decades.
2) Suicide.
3) Art Dealers can’t resist your tragic story.

Consider the story of how the novel A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES won the (posthumous for the writer John Kennedy Toole) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Now, I've read CONFEDERACY, and the novel is a train wreck, although it is, at times, a delightfully amusing train wreck. There is some serious entertainment within the covers of this novel, if the reader is willing to go with the flow and ignore how this novel is not like any other novel.

Legend has it that John Kennedy Toole was so depressed at his total failure as a writer that he offed himself in a car with carbon monoxide and a hose to the exhaust. About 5 years after John's death, his mother found a smudged barely readable carbon copy of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES and took it upon herself to find a publisher.

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confed...

Thelma Toole was persistent and tried several different publishers to no avail.

Thelma repeatedly called Walker Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, demanding he read it. He initially resisted; however, as he recounts in the book's foreword:

...the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading. In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good."

But I am joking a bit in advocating suicide as a method of artistic promotion. Bad Publicity may be much better!

Consider the career of Kanye West. My personal take on the 2009 MTV Video Award show where Kanye forced the microphone from Taylor Swift's fingers as she was trying to give her acceptance speech and proclaimed that another video should have won--was the best thing that ever happened for his career! This firestorm of negative publicity branded his name forever on the consciousness of Western media (and, in my opinion, the enormous exposure was also the best thing that ever happened to Taylor Swift's career).

Last I checked West has 21 Grammy Awards.

@hg47