Basically, though my inclination to not be so “harsh” when saying this to people says more about me than anything, honestly. Art is used and has always been used by human beings in an intersubjective way, so any attempt to describe art as a sociological phenomenon cannot ignore this. For most of human history this has been common sense but that common sense has been sacrificed for the sake of something else (I think it has something to do with the idea of intellectual property, but this isn’t a developed thread of thought yet).
I remember once reading an article on Maori poetry (for a worldbuilding project, if I remember correctly) and it was talking about the fact that they did not perceive poetry as “belonging” to anyone other than the culture itself. The article was interesting but I couldn’t help but think: “Isn’t this how it’s always been?” I mean, it’s not like Romans didn’t know that Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses but the work itself would have been considered a “Roman work”, if you get what I mean.
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