19th century cult of the virtuoso? ....an uneasy melding of craft and the ideology of "progress"....the extension of private property into the realm of ideas/art?
>And something similar occurs when you try to reproduce, recite or
>perform a known work, say a poem, a play, a piece of music---which gets
>back to part of Carrol's point about the Iliad. But then whole
>cultures engage in this kind of loosely defined reproduction or
>plagiarism, when there is a collective attempt to return to a golden
>age.
Good one! And points actually to the human anxiety about the "new" -- thus the re-naissance, which was a world away from the classical world, molded itself on classical models while introducing genuinely new/dynamic/modern elements. This is all too clear in the plastic arts and drama. It is also there in the development of mathematics, see Jacob Klein "Greek Mathematical Thought and the Invention of Algebra," one of the best scholarly/philosphy of science books I have ever read. (There's a lot more to say about this as I think the classical modelling was a slick cover for an essentially reactionnary political agenda. The reaction against the high middle ages covers a multitude of sins, chief of which was the abandoment of the genuinely vernacular-humanist drift of the latter as bodied forth by Chaucer, Langland, Dante.)
>Mass culture is full of this sort thing with endless period
>tableaux. Some of these are amazingly wrong, especially if you have
>lived in the period that has been reproduced. But like mirrors in
>mirrors, seeing one of these period set pieces, better reveals the
>mind set of the reproduction, rather than period reproduced.
Except it's more pastiche than conscious imitation. Mass culture needs to find its content somewhere....because (ahem), capitalism is a bit short on content.
Cheers,
Joanna