I have been told (have not verified this) that "our current idea that art is something to consume rather than create for oneself" started with dance during the Roman Empire. Dance had been something that every able person did. In Classical Greece, high government officials had certain dances that they were expected to do as part of the ceremonial aspects of their jobs. It was with Rome that the ruling classes began to relate to dance as something the lower orders did to entertain them, not something they did themselves. I don't know whether this is related, but I think it's significant that, while the Classical world did have a system of musical notation, almost no Classical Roman music survives, although we know they had a rich musical culture. We have much more from the Greeks, partly due to their practice of carving hymns onto slabs of stone. When the Romans adopted Greek religion, for some reason they left that practice behind.
Super interesting! I haven't gone far back in the history of these ideas, but I'll veer in that direction at some point. I of course have an ever-growing stack of books to read in varying tangents of these thought. I also often think of the history of payment for the arts, such as patronage models for artists like Michelangelo (as described in the Agony and the Ecstasy), and how it affected who was able to make that their livelihood and the sorts of art that gets made. Sarah Jaffe points out in Work Won't Love You Back, for example, that the reason so much old art consists of portraits of old white men because those were the people who were paying the artists to make the paintings. But mostly my area of reading and experience seems to focus more on the last hundred years, for no reason in particular. If you have any good book recommendations for histories into these kinds of subjects, I'm totally down to make a trek down that path.
I have been told (have not verified this) that "our current idea that art is something to consume rather than create for oneself" started with dance during the Roman Empire. Dance had been something that every able person did. In Classical Greece, high government officials had certain dances that they were expected to do as part of the ceremonial aspects of their jobs. It was with Rome that the ruling classes began to relate to dance as something the lower orders did to entertain them, not something they did themselves. I don't know whether this is related, but I think it's significant that, while the Classical world did have a system of musical notation, almost no Classical Roman music survives, although we know they had a rich musical culture. We have much more from the Greeks, partly due to their practice of carving hymns onto slabs of stone. When the Romans adopted Greek religion, for some reason they left that practice behind.
Super interesting! I haven't gone far back in the history of these ideas, but I'll veer in that direction at some point. I of course have an ever-growing stack of books to read in varying tangents of these thought. I also often think of the history of payment for the arts, such as patronage models for artists like Michelangelo (as described in the Agony and the Ecstasy), and how it affected who was able to make that their livelihood and the sorts of art that gets made. Sarah Jaffe points out in Work Won't Love You Back, for example, that the reason so much old art consists of portraits of old white men because those were the people who were paying the artists to make the paintings. But mostly my area of reading and experience seems to focus more on the last hundred years, for no reason in particular. If you have any good book recommendations for histories into these kinds of subjects, I'm totally down to make a trek down that path.