Art is out of excess. The wonderful thing about art is that it IS out of excess and humans seem to need it still, as though it were not.
Joanna -----------
Maybe it isn't. Consider there is no such activity as art in societies that have not under gone extensive differentiation and specialization. In that context all sorts of categories that we consider intrinsic to culture are erased or conflated or folded into one another.
BTW, I wrote a long answer to your post on jealousy that agreed with you, but ended by saying that there was profit to be made in envy because of its dry qualities--a nawing need that travelled well from one purchase to the next. While jealousy in its outlandish forms destorys social relations and therefore can not be tailored to fit and motivate mass consumer culture. But somewhere along the way the post took a dark turn into capital's need to constricted and normalize the bourgeois psyche, commodify it etc, etc,---and so on.
Chuck Grimes