Why can the bourgeoisie live without literature and art?

BarcelonaThe bourgeoisie—a word that, in all fairness, only designates the upper middle class of a fairly large city—presents some fairly clear constants, throughout the continent, in terms of its attitude towards forms of high culture: the folore (as it was said before) is something else, and it differs from what we call "culture" here because culture always presents new things, and folklore very few, or none.

This bourgeois class could possess a lot or a little culture, but it was something they possessed more than they do now—they had a piano in their home—but they considered it important and helped them when the public authorities neglected them or didn't have the economic power to pay for it. Perhaps it was just a sign of class distinction, but they cultivated it.

Paul Valéry He gave a lecture in 1937 in which he addressed this issue, and even at that time he expressed doubts about the consistency or durability of the philanthropic nature of the bourgeoisie: "You will easily recognize the bourgeois (assuming they still exist, which is not clear) by the fact that this man, or this woman, may be works to be admired, yet they have no need for poetry or art. They can live without this element. However, the bourgeoisie then consumed that culture and it helped it. This was, in Catalonia, one of the causes of the flourishing of letters and the arts in Modernisme and Noucentisme. Many decades have passed and, although the prosperity of the bourgeois class has been much greater than that of the middle or lower classes, it is a fact that, at this time, not only can they live without literature and art, but they have generally lost interest. Perhaps a good law of patronage, such as has never been seen in Catalonia would help.

Let the reader excuse the term we will now use: the citizens of our days, including the bourgeoisie, have despiritualizedWhere they once subsidized classical music concerts (greatly declining in our country), they now subsidize summer festivals with little or no presence of truly spiritual music. Since this decline in the ability to appreciate the highest aesthetic forms that a spirit can generate has taken on such a preponderance, it will be strange—with exceptions—if the urban bourgeois class will soon offer much support to anything other than spectacular or banal artistic productions, forms of populist culture that leave no one healthy.