Art Will Never Be Only Art for Art's Sake While We Remain Mortal

"'Pure' Artistic appreciation is to my thinking only an ideal, when not merely a figment, and must be, so long as the appreciation of art is an affair of limited and transient human beings existing in space and time. Both artist and audience are limited."

-T. S. Elliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Elliot,

'Art for art's sake' is a religious call, and one that even the most devout worshipers of art cannot accomplish simply because they are limited. Humans get hungry, fall in love, conduct commerce, and fight wars; all of which must get in the way of our art. Besides the demands of life, we know too little to appreciate art much without appropriating it heuristically as well. Only God has the necessary aseity to communicate in such a teleologically comprehensive way as we would like our art to be.

However, we can--as Christians--look forward to a time when we throw away our mortality and leave behind the dichotomy of the immediately practical and the magnificently artistic. In heaven our consuming occupation will be worship--reflecting the glory and beauty of God with ever increasing accuracy and comprehensiveness. All the aesthetic thirst of the human soul will be filled in the infinite beauty of God, and our duty will be to drink from this fountain for all eternity. We will never be God, but we will move ever closer to the union of knowing and enjoying and creating and communicating.