Kafka or Does an Artist Need an Audience?

I miss those evenings and nights sitting next to the regular guys in the pub or café just listening for hours with no particular interest to their converstions until the lights go on and just then being caught up in a fervent argument and feeling so strongly about it that the discussion would go on for at least one hour on the outside. One of the most vividly rememberred was my view that an artist per defintion needs/craves for an audience. My opponent proposed as an example to the contrary Franz Kafka, who in his will left manuscripts to Max Brod instructing him to destroy them, but Brod published them instead. Yet I argued that by writing his stories down Kafka had an audience though this just consisted of one - himself (Jorge Borges comments on the odd experience of re-reading his own writings and becoming a reader indeed - later on he would also write a short story in which he would encounter his later self). And even Max Brod at least must have been perceived as an addressee by Kafka, in that he left those private writings to him. All in all this discussion turned out to be a most inspiring one...