“Art” and the “artist” – by which we mean an autonomous realm of art and a specialist practitioner in music, painting, literature, whatever – are the historical creation of the division of labour and the existence of surplus value within the host society. Subsistence economies may have individuals who tell stories, sing songs, draw drawings, but they don’t have artists.
Ian Bostridge, from Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (2014)
