The individual artist plays the role of a kind of "damaged" vessel into which subjectivity flees in its attempt to escape the reifying effects of bourgeois practice. Artists embody the last outpost of subjectivity, they are neurotic Messiahs, as it were, who represent for all humankind the final hope for salvation from the wholly administered and rationalized world.

p. 26 - Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature 1770-1914 (1995)