Breadless art

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Breadless art describes activities and actions, usually of a professional nature, which are important for the performer, but may be perceived as interesting by others, but do not contribute sufficiently to the performer's livelihood.

Definition

The term bread stands pars pro toto for an adequate income per se, which goes back to the fact that in pre-industrial society bread was the most important staple food for a long time . This is already evident in the poet Juvenal coined turn bread and circuses (lat. Bread and circuses) , as well as in the line give us today our daily bread in the Lord's Prayer , the most common prayer of Christendom . The term art originally meant not only the fine arts , but any professional skill as such.

The term is not infrequently used as a catchphrase for young people whose career choices do not match the wishes of their parents. Salomon Heine remarked about his nephew Heinrich "Had learned to do business, would not need to write poetry".

Historical

The trope “bread” in the sense of earning a living has been used in connection with art since the 16th century. Michael Neander mentions in his collection of German proverbs in 1590: “ Art goes for bread ”, Martin Luther is quoted as saying: “ Art goes for bread, but bread will run after it again and not find it ”. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing created in his tragedy Emilia Galotti the well-known quote to the prince's question “ [...] What does art do? "; when he lets the court painter Conti answer: “ Prince, art goes for bread. "

All of this is based on the centuries-old gap between art as an expression of the beautiful, which finds its justification in itself, and the concept of art, which also derives its motivation from securing an artist's livelihood.

The calendar story Brotlose Kunst by Johann Peter Hebel , which first appeared in 1808 in the Rhineland family friend and then in 1811 in the treasure chest of the Rhenish family friend , is well known. The anecdote told by Hebel has its roots in a story by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian . Before lever u. a. Gottfried August Bürger already used the anecdote, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Johann Georg Hamann , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche also took up the text or the motif.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Neander (1590), p. 338. 
  2. Quoted from Büchmann (1898), p. 123. 
  3. ^ Lessing (1772), first act, second appearance.
  4. Johann Peter Hebel: Brodlose Art (original spelling). In: Wikisource [1]
  5. Michael Stolleis : Breadless Art - Four Studies on Johann Peter Lever . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, 48 pages (= Scientific Society at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main - meeting reports [WGF-S] Volume XLIV, No. 2 [44.2]) ISBN 978-3-515- 08916-6
  6. See review by Rudolf Walther : How far anecdotes wander. Stolleis traces the sources of Leebel's stories with historical-philological acumen . In: Research Frankfurt 3/2007, p. 105.

literature