phil.p":2loyksos said:
I doubt Michelangelo painted the Cistine Chapel in the lunch breaks from his day job. I doubt that orchestras would exist without concert halls - which someone else paid for (they also used music which the composer more often than not had been paid to write), and while local peasants might have given their labour free on major projects for decades (which I doubt), I doubt they paid for the stone.
Even today's community projects often depend on benefactors somewhere along the line - my nephew has been volunteering at a conservation trust for a couple of months, and he boasts about what a wonderful job they do for the community, free. It doesn't dawn on him that the only reason he can do it is that I'm feeding and housing him gratis.
There isn't a material cost involved in opening your mouth and singing, but there is in virtually everything else that's "free". It all gets paid for somewhere. Whether "we should be grateful to rich people for our culture" or not is a different discussion.
Michaelangelo schmangelo, why on earth is that overrated old darling always qouted high on the cognosceinti top 10 lists as the epitome of culture?? Its the same old chestnut, the dogmatic assumption that european culture (art, theatre, opera, whatever) is a simply marvellous pheomenon and is the benchmark of high brow quality, regardless of how it was created in practical terms, and what it cost.
Your right, the peasants never paid for any stone, why? because they were uncouth philistines? No, simply because they were historically stripped of any claim to ownership of those sort of resources, and couldnt donate any even if they had wanted to-just in case you forgot. After events such as the enclosure acts, what little the peasant labouring class had access to was curtailed still further. It was Lord and Lady Addlesh#te and all the rest of the aristocrat leeches who "owned everything" servants, tradesmen, labourers, clergy, even the fish and animals, and woe betide any one foolish enough to challenge that cynically titled "natural order of things".... Agreed Phil, someone
did pay for all those wonderful, enlightening, culturally enriching articles.
Any way, to get back to the original subject, the ironic thing is that despite Mr Browns rantings about the failings of power tools, and the virtues of hand tools, the fact remains that he accomplished the most trickiest part of the chair build (making the bent arms) using a
power tool (large bandsaw) to prepare the arm stock, which as far as I know, no other chairmaker does.
LOL Maybe Mr Brown was merely doing a bit of Malcolm Mclaren type publicity stunting with his writings, stir up and generate controversy to get known... :wink:
