beauty (pt. 2)

"One of the good effects of artistic beauty is that by being essentially nonutilitarian it draws a boundary  around the compulsion to make money. It clears a ground in which people can recover and celebrate human values for their own sake. It thus serves as an invaluable antidote to the materialism and acquisitiveness that are always threatening to overwhelm the human race and are especially prominent in our own technological society." -Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination

beauty

"The biblical attitude toward beauty stands opposed to a movement within contemporary art and aesthetics....that disparages beauty and form in arts [and] produces art that deliberately attempts to destroy form in art....these artists are "making a statement." But what kind of statement is it? That the universe is ugly and meaningless and chaotic. This is not the christian view of the universe. In a christian world view, the universe has meaning. That the world is fallen and frequently ugly is something that Christians know even better than others. But at the heart of Christianity is the redemptive principle that it is not enough to leave the fallen world where it is."

-Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination