Nonsense. Open a book about music or art history.
I have, and they have all agreed with me. The mass majority of musician and artists before the modern period (and after the centralization of states) were on the payroll of the rich, were already rich, or were trying to be funded by rich.
(In this case I am including the Church as among the 'rich', as the Church was Europe's greatest patronizer of art after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The 'state' should also be included here.)
Nearly all the names/production people think of when they think of great art were funded by such things. The Greek (mainly Athenian, as most others have been tragically lost) dramas people know so much about today were funded every year by wealthy contributors to the state. Da Vinci was the son of a rich legal notary, and all of his work was commissioned by the wealthy. Verrocchio's (Da Vinci's mentor) guild was directly funded by the De Medici in Florence, as were a great number of other artists. All of Mozart's early work was played in the courts of noblemen- the first being in Munich (can't remember the nobleman's name off hand), but spreading out further.
I won't insult your intelligence by saying who patronized Shakespeare. Carvantes was a nobleman (his grandfather a famous lawyer and his uncle an important mayor), and he worked directly for Cardinals and Admirals.
And this doesn't just extend to writers, artists, and musician. Locke was first patronized by the Earl of Shaftebury and latter by William of Orange's wife. Hobbes came from a rich enough family to perform a 'grand tour' of Europe. Descartes was funded by a variety of universities in the Dutch Republic, almost all of which were funded by the Dutch government.
What I am trying to say here is that there is a reason no lower class citizens ever became artists, or writers, or scholars, or musicians. The ability to make it a full time job made it an available course of action for those who were not being aided by the wealthy, the Church or the state to undertake. And these are just a few of the names that I have off the top of my head- I could write dozens of more examples and hundreds exist that I can not remember right now. In all honesty I'd be surprised if you can even name ten exceptions to the general rule.
Isn't it incredible, sometimes, how much people THINK they know about ANY branch ofhistory, and how little they actually do know?
Haha, fighting words. Well, let's have a little friendly debate then. Art history wasn't what I learned in (I am proud to say Ivy League) college, but I know it well enough to tango.
tl;dr
Cut the prolix. It's late over here in the UK and it's too tedious to read your verbose posts.
I repeat: if we own our ideas how do you teach people? Are students stealing from their teachers?
I first would like to say that I haven't been following this debate at all closely, so if this doesn't answer your question please ignore it.
Usually this debate isn't over the esoteric form of an idea, which can be given freely by one person to another through use of words, but a product that is produced from an idea.
This isn't the best example, but it is above-ground for a teacher to tell his students about, say, Tacitus (who, by the way, was a Roman Senator, an extraordinarily wealthy class), but it is not alright for them to 'steal' a copy of a book that has some of Tacitus' writing in it and give it to his class, since someone took the time to collect the writings, translate them, and the put them into book form.
