Artists and the moral imagination

I mentioned in the post below that, whereas the gentleman was the highest exemplar of the moral imagination in Christendom, the artist has become his heir in post-Christendom. It occurs to me that the artist is doing on paper what the gentleman did on land--setting a part of the cosmos in order. Moral imagination has become the domain of the artist now because his art is not dependent on his economy: he does not need an orderly society and marketplace in order to write. Perhaps this explains the dramatic appearance of Southern literature shortly after the destruction of the Southern infrastructure.