> Does he mean Matthias Grünewald the renaissance painter and Heinrich
> Schütz the early baroque composer?
Yep. It's a moment of irony - (European) classics are refunctioned into apostles of (colonial) futurity.
The link to positivism is this: the ideology of Enlightenment demands that culture should be morally uplifting, while the positivists demand that culture should be, above all, profitable. The means are more important than the ends. What gets left out is the actual potential of the work of art, and its potentially radical interpretation.
-- DRR