Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
Roger Kimball (2000). “Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age”, Ivan R Dee
