There was a time when only a privileged few were given the opportunity to create art. While the less fortunate were out tilling the fields, court-appointed portraitists were funded by royal patrons to immortalise their subject s likeness on canvas. While us regular folk gnawed on potato peels, married our cousins and died of a cough at the ripe old age of 28, an enlightened few were permitted to daub landscapes in expensive oil paints, to write beautiful plays and sonnets, and to carve men with tight little asses out of giant blocks of marble.

(more…)