The trite old mercantile image of the artist as a parasite, living off the surplus of more developed societies, needs to be rejected. Every artist, however humble, is a useful producer, and many great artists help to create the environments in which men and women of the future will live. Now that information technology has become more calibrated to personal and domestic use, this ideal may seem more feasible. The fit between personal and social fulfilment is never easily achieved. Keynes wisely observed that a reliance on market forces would never, of itself, have guaranteed the development of roads, street lighting, and so on.
Some government intervention is needed in areas of public utility.
This is also true of the arts, especially in smaller countries whose private industries are never wealthy enough to offer major subsidies. Yet, if government subventions become pervasive, they can smother creativity and compromise independence, something which happened in the countries of the Eastern Bloc before 1989. The balancing of these forces must include a separation of realms, and a recognition that that which seems audacious today may appear commonplace very soon. As Scott Fitzgerald sadly joked an artist writes for the youth of today, the critics of tomorrow and the schoolmaster of ever after . The vital importance of youth in all this is obvious.