THE WESTERN LIBERAL LEGACY HAS REFRAMED “freedom” in an entanglement of misconceptions and skewed viewpoints. In the arts, they tend to be sacralised as an absolute precondition of the artist. Yet for all its lofty intent, art is still a product of human hands and minds. Its object shouldn’t blind us to the unavoidable and less glamorous realities of economic and legal constraints faced by artists.
To acknowledge this is not to reduce intellectual debates to balance sheets. But the limitations matter, since it is precisely within set frameworks that humans thrive, even if it is to transgress or transform them. Creativity involves making the most of what is available to us at a given time. As such, constraints aren’t automatically “negative”, in the sense that they represent a nuisance that needs to be removed at all costs.
The contemporary fixation on extolling “freedom” as a cornerstone of artistic expression stems from a flattened
