(Sorry for delayed response)

Thanks. As to your first question. I don’t know. I guess I was assuming at least that there is some correlation between societies with famous or rich people and societies with artistic cultures. But actually thinking about it some more, maybe that excludes too much far. For example, think about folk art, or in particular street art — the people who do that aren’t rich or famous. By contrast, someone doing fine art is almost certainly going to have a decent amount of money behind them. So I guess my answer is: it depends on the type of art. And this fact — which I didn’t realize at the time of writing, so thanks for asking the question — might offer some way forward when thinking about how art should be produced in our society. Maybe artists should aim more for street art than museum art as their paradigm.

As to your second question — well, that’s a deep one that I don’t know that I’ll be able to satisfactorily answer completely. But just to give some particular examples. I think cultural equality is important because I think that having a diversity of perspectives is inherently a good thing, and I think equality furthers that. I want to consume art by a bunch of different people, so I can see how the different ways they perceive and understand the world. I think political equality is important for reasons you might be able to guess — if we’re all in a society together, we should all have a say in how it’s run.

As to your point about attempts to implement inequality having failed — I accept it, but at the same time I don’t think something’s having failed before is a reason not to keep trying it, if you think the thing is good (it wouldn’t be good if people had stopped trying to build planes after the first few crashed). One thing you said is intriguing — that it’s against human nature. What do you mean by that? Do you have examples? Maybe I should think some about this — if it is indeed human nature that things be unequal (maybe my post already argues that, because it’s human nature that we have the finite amount of attention we do), then maybe the pursuit of equality is indeed to be given up on. Anyway, thanks for reading and for the questions which made me think some more!