Fifth footnote to the post titled “Smell the Right Place”

And in a sense, the broader contradiction between political and social reality on one hand and the creative and imaginative impulse on the other hand can be boiled down or simplified to the basic and innate divide between the liberal bourgeois world on one hand and the world of authentic and pure art on the other hand. To borrow from one Romantic scholar: “In the artist’s perspective the bourgeois world with its principle of ‘profit and advantage’ – the economic and social-utilitarian mode of thought – appears as a uniquely profane sphere.” As one artist exclaimed after having been pressured to “sell himself” to the bourgeois art market: “I betrayed the sacred to the profane.”

In essence, the liberal bourgeois-capitalist world is a world that is “dominated by greed and lust for power” and in turn serves as the impetus or the source for the broader contradiction between political and social reality on one hand and the creative and imaginative impulse on the other hand.