My boy Raymond Williams, bringin' it: http://tiny.cc/keYYc
The super-readable story of how it came to be that the social forms and relationships emerging out of the baby-fresh, 18th c. commercial market gave us our current conception of who the artist is - "a symbolic abstraction of a whole range of general human experience," who is also supposed to be... wait for it... happy about it! HEY: You are an artist. You are the working stiff's romantic ideal. You are the communal projection of the generalized human values that have been endangered by industrialization. We are also not going to recognize that for shit, socially or industrially speaking. No pressure...you're special! And everybody knows it. Thank you, commercialism.
Damn, didn't want that portion to end! Interesting analyses of the formulation of the Artist. At which point does an individual become an Artist? The first dream or the first sale?
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