The intellectual-property industry has labored tirelessly to convince the public, which loves storytelling and painting and film as much as it ever has, that art is never individual, and that artists are not real, or no longer real. The reconfiguration of art—just generating a clause about art—is now to be reckoned the same as the entire creative process. Anything people really like, in this construction, was just the collective work of semi-skilled craftspeople interpreting the audience’s own brilliant whims, those whims having been carefully winnowed by a wise and benevolent overclass of creative executives.
Too good not to quote that much.