Culture requires leisure, but does it really require a "leisured class"?

Lukács cites the following passage from Nietzsche:

A higher civilization can only come about when there are two distinct social castes: that of the working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure; or, to put it more strongly, the caste of forced labor and the caste of free labor.
Nietzsche, Works (Kroner, Leipzig), Volume II, p. 327

Lukács assumes that Nietzsche had perpetuation of bourgeois imperialism as his final goal. In fact, it is an intermediate goal. The final goal is existence of a leisure class that is not subordinated to anyone, and can thus produce art and literature that expresses something individual rather than something devised merely to please others and earn a wage for it’s author.

Nietzsche is certainly right that leisure is required to produce great art, philosophy, and other manifestations of civilization. In order for someone to produce great art he must to a large extent be at leisure to choose his subject matter, and he must not feel compelled to produce art that appeals to the masses. But whether this requires a distinct caste is open to question. Propitious conditions for culture can also occur if there are enough patrons of humanities to support culture, or if the state supports culture, or if there is enough of a paying audience with refined taste to support culture, or even if the artist needs to divert only a small fraction of his time into mundane works that “pay the bills” to support his more advanced art. Could it be that Nietzsche’s pessimistic views on this subject were conditioned by his own inability to obtain an adequate income from his writing?