I was having a wonderfully relaxing bath, having running around chasing a tennis ball (second session on court this week) and needing the zen (a word, by the way, hugely distantly related to the English word ‘semantic’), whilst listening to Classic FM. One of the tracks played was an appropriately relaxing, yet entertaining concerto by Edvard Grieg. Post-bath, in a hurry to find out what it was, I searched the web and found a recording of it, freely availble, in amongst a series of other recordings.
I went to the homepage and found the following interesting quote. I appear to be collecting them. From http://ibiblio.org:
The demoralizing effect of commercialism upon artists themselves is too well known to require more than a reminder; hasty work for the sake of money supplants careful work for the sake of beauty; whole arts, like that of oriental rug weaving, are thereby threatened with extinction; and, instead of producing spontaneous art that would express themselves, people allow themselves to be merely entertained by things supplied to them, nasty and cheap–folk art disappears. — Parker, Dewitt H., 2002