Mozart's 250th birthday

The Spanish writer Andrés Trapiello looks at the commercial exploitation of Mozart's 250th birthday. "To what point do we have a right to tell the commercial market, 'Get your dirty hands off my Mozart!', when we are also complicit ourselves? To avoid the act of consumption when, for once, it brings us closer to excellence, strikes me as very strange and, in my humble opinion, makes us look inevitably like 'idiots'. And proclaiming that we are spurning consumerism, only to sneak back in through the back door, is a wretched ruse. ... It is not always pleasant to have to share something with people who we do not think deserve it. ... But if artworks from the past are to teach us something, it is their ability to belong, as Nietzsche put it, to everybody and to nobody."

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