> 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've heard this argument lots: that in a classless society there would
be no motive for art. But I don't buy it. Classless society is not a
frictionless society -- the frictions would just be more interesting:
life and death; order and chaos; male and female; the cyclical and the
linear, the natural and the artificial......all the stuff that art loves
to deal with.
I mean, do people only sing because they're oppressed? Have you ever walked through a grove at dusk and heard the avian symphonies? Have you ever experienced enough darkness to really see the stars at night? Have you ever been in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight? Have you ever been transfixed by a beautiful woman? We live amidst a lot of jaw-dropping stuff. Great food for Art!
Joanna