Little Pleasures Little Treasures!

What better day to write about the pleasure in art than today, Miros birthday! Blessings to Google for bringing that to our attention!

I would like to point out this fervent belief that academics and intellectuals have in the present-day that pleasure in art somehow cheapens it, makes it like Disneyland or a Chocolate Box.
I dont agree with that belief, and am relieved to find I am not alone.
Fine art doesn't have to be for beating oneself over the back with, or for shoring up ones morality. That's what the Guardian is for!

Here's whatChristopher Butler says:

We worry a good deal about the moral and political significance of the arts. But this seems to me to be far too easy. Anyone can think up or obey political or moral principles and apply them to art, and many do. Such arguements are parasitic on those that we have all the time, and they often just use art to make familiar moral or political points which are usually believed in by the critic on grounds quite other than the examination or art. For example, if you know that patriarchy abuses women by displaying their bodies for the male's pleasure, then it can hardly come as a great surprise to be told that Titian's Venus of Urbino is somehow 'implicated' in the system and somehow bad. It is the fate of the pleasure the picture can give that interests me.

Some people are completely implacable when it comes to the idea of pleasure, believing like Protestants that any enjoyment must be evil, and that things should have a "higher purpose". But what higher purpose is there but pleasure? It elevates the person to a place outside themselves, neutering self-obsessiveness and neuroses, and enabling the viewer to become whole and truly oceanic, far more useful in the world than they would be if they were blindly (and lazily) bandwagonning!