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Why do I even bother.
Truth is that patronage created a network of powers that continuously balanced one another. Even in France, w/ a highly centralised power, the king wasn't deciding all tiny details & ind. artists had room for creativity. Royal absolutism in arts has been debunked (i.e. Fumaroli).
Ofc there were norms! Art is *not* created in a vacuum. The issue w/ the liberal world is to turn any constraint into a negative, coercive vision (and, in return, to consider the artist as a fake demiurge) when it's actually fundamental for the structure & meaning of the work.
It's partly why I think we've lost all understanding of what rhetorics in its broad sense (synonym of culture) actually means. Why we can't use the codes/structures of the past to create (or only in a sterilised/degraded way) bc it's not perceived as a framework enabling freedom.
We've replaced it with various concepts such as ‘authentic self’ but art is not sustainable on the sole basis of identity politics when those are constantly reduced to the one of the individual… “Il n'y a point d'homme dans le monde” (De Maistre).
A good, practical ex of this loss of understanding re rhetorics is the fact that no significant piece of art has engaged with the current health crisis through the lens of robust systems of meaning such as the danse macabre, which enables a complex network of codes & readings.
Anyone who believes that listening to Jean-Baptiste Lully, one of the most amazing geniuses that ever walked this earth, means glorifying Louis XIV by association is just a cretin or an ideologue.
Now laughing at Schönberg who thought he was creating a ‘democratic’ form of music by promulgating dodecaphonism. Mate, they don't even bother listening to you know, who were you kidding.
