Art for Art's sake

About the issue of 'Art for Art's sake' I propose that CS Lewis held the finest judgement on the matter:

It is hard not to argue that all the greatest poems have

been made by men who valued something else much

more than poetry—even if that something else were

only cutting down enemies in a cattle-raid or tumbling

a girl in bed. The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all

with those who make literature a self-existent thing to

be valued for its own sake.
 

....... Ultimate relativism, nihilism, and post-modernism are all forms of pride. If there is no objective reality outside of me, then I don’t have to submit to it. Lewis thought that such views would mean the “abolition of man.” In a book by that title he defended “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  So Lewis devoted his life not to creating reality, but to seeing it and saying it well.

"An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody interms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. That is the response of humility to the world one is given by a Creator. It inclines one to love truth and to endeavor for all one’s ideas to fit the truth."