After all, the development of powerful and severely punitive systems of censorship is a fairly clear indication that not everything produced was done at the behest of elites. Nor is there any reason to think that these systems operated with perfect efficiency. Benedict Spinoza, for instance, used a false name to avoid the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition. Nicholas Copernicus waited until he was on his death bed before risking the publication of his life's work. Michelangelo made surreptitious use of cadavers to sharpen his anatomical skills. So yes, deeply influential work did happen on occasion, in spite of efforts to suppress it. But these instances remained the exception, not the rule. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the mere existence of finished creative work testified to its passage through elaborate systems of review and control, and its successful receipt of official sanction.

Given the considerable power over people's minds that art has always carried, the ubiquity of these systems shouldn't be surprising - especially when you remember that from the time sharply stratified societies first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia until the emergence of pluralistic forms of government in and around the 18th century, absolutist autocracies defined virtually all governing systems. Those that didn't seize control of cultural production not only lost the benefit of its power, they ran the risk of having that power used against them.

Even in cases where producers managed to secure a measure of independence (e.g. Kabuki theater under the Tokugawa Shogunate), much of their creativity focused on the evasion of the controls that remained in place. In this regard, the censorious influence of the ruling class remained profoundly influential, even if their rules were acknowledged mainly in the breach, or in obedience that was flamboyantly limited to the letter of the law, and not its spirit.

The development that changed all this was the emergence of pluralistic government, which was characterized by competing groups that each recognized their own inability to dominate government well enough to realize that they were better off in working together to limit government power in general than they were in trying to secure it for themselves exclusively. Sharply curtailing the power of official censors proved to be among the most effective ways of promoting and preserving pluralism. In the wake of these policy developments, humanist strands of culture exploded in volume and popularity.

My point is all this is that anyone thinking that the current level of intellectual and creative freedom - or even anything approaching it remotely - is deeply uninformed about the realities of artistic and cultural work throughout the bulk of post-Neolithic history. Yes, the desire to do this work has always existed. But for the most part, the satisfaction of that desire has only been permitted in very narrow and tightly controlled circumstances, and almost invariably in ways that enhance the strength and stature of hereditary rulers. To the extent that history of art reads like the autobiography of power, the democratization of its creation doesn't appear until a very recent period.