joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
"Did Mozart need an award? You think you need something more than the capacity to compose Marriage of Figaro? What he really needed was simply the means to live to work his miracles, that's all. And he didn't even get that."
Your point is well-made. However, when you're talking about the conditions that produced an artistic work in a very markedly class society, it may be more complicated than you say. i.e. maybe without the spectacle of a class society, and the frustration he felt at having to grovel for pay in it (not to mention the influence of his father, which is another matter) Mozart wouldnt have bothered with Marriage of Figaro, just as Shakespeare might not have written many of his great works (Hamlet, for instance -- how could one write Hamlet in a classless society? For that matter, where would the material for comedy come from, in a classless society?)
I'm well aware that the artistic drive is irrational, grips you against your will, and can ruin an otherwise placid life. But somehow, it seems it might starve in a harmonious classless society.
More generally, I seem to hear in Andie's remark "I am an individual, different from other people, and I like it that way."
BobW
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Me, I'm a thoroughgoing elitist and inegalitarian. I
>don't think that cornering a market in skill, etc.
>should give anyone the right to monopolize all the
>good things in life, much less to pass it on to one's
>undeserving children. But I think that accomplishment
>deserves honor, contribution deserves material reward,
>inequality can be based on desert as well as need, and
>lots of other bourgeois ideology. But I never said i
>wasn't a bourgeois liberal.
>
If you're great at something: dance, math, writing, skipping rope,
drawing....that IS your reward.
As for honor: you will be honored by those who are able to really appreciate what you do: other dancers, artists, writers, etc. You will have the respect of people you respect.
So, you have a skill/talent/gift and you have the respect of people whose respect matters. Why do you need anything on top of that? That's a serious question.
It seems to me that the way this "reward/honor" thing plays out in class society is that by rewarding/honoring a very, very few people who actually deserve it (at the end of their lives usually when it is actually no help at all), you are implying that all the people at the top actually deserve to be there because of some special merit or skill. A sort of virtue by association. George Bush gets to give Ella Fitzgerald a presidential medal...and that makes both of them look deserving.
But it's just crap. Did Mozart need an award? You think you need something more than the capacity to compose Marriage of Figaro? What he really needed was simply the means to live to work his miracles, that's all. And he didn't even get that.
>Still, I think this is the issue Joanna is raising,
>have I got you right?
>
Absolutely.
Joanna
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