Art for Its Own Sake?

Descent into Limbo by Andrea Mantegna

Allan de Botton asks: Should art really be for its own sake alone?

"We have too easily swallowed the modernist idea that art that aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be "bad art" – Soviet art is routinely trotted out here as an example – and that only art that wants nothing of us can be good. Hence the all-too-frequent question with which we leave the modern museum of art: what did that mean?

"Why should this veneration of ambiguity continue? Why should confusion be a central aesthetic emotion? Is an emptiness of intent on the part of an artwork really a sign of its importance?"

Read the whole piece HERE.