I’ve begun reading Shakespearean Negotiations by Stephen Greenblatt. This passage from the first chapter, “The Circulation of Social Energy”, expresses perfectly something I have been trying to understand myself over the last few years about the nature of art:

I propose that we begin taking seriously the collective production of literary pleasure and interest. We know that this production is collective since language itself, which is at the hear of literary power, is the supreme instance of a collective creation. But this knowledge has for the most part remained inert, either cordoned off in prefatory acknowledgements or diffused in textual analyses that convey almost nothing of the social dimension of literature’s power. Instead the work seems to stand only for the skill and effort of the individual artist, as if whole cultures possessed their shared emotions, stories, and dreams only because a professional caste invented them and parceled them out. In literary criticism Renaissance artists function like Renaissance monarchs: at some level we know perfectly well that the power of the prince is largely a collective invention, the symbolic embodiment of the desire, pleasure, and violence of thousands of subjects, the insturmental expression of complex networks of dependency and fear, the agent rather than the maker of the social will. Yet we can scarcely write of prince or poet without accepting the fiction that power directly emanates from him and that society draws upon this power.