Nice post on art from Church of the Masses (via Disputations):
The notion that the arts are optional is absurd in the same way that the suggestion that making choices could be optional for human beings. We are constituted as a kind of being that chooses and a kind of being that decorates. Both things set us apart and define us.
Notre Dame professor and Catholic author Ralph McInerny writes:
Think of those prehistoric hunters, then, returned from the arduous pursuit of prey. They are weary, they have been, let us hope, successful. They are certainly very practical men. Yet some among them begin to draw on the walls representations of the animals they have hunted and will hunt again. The rest presumably marvel at the pictures. They let them be. They ponder and enjoy them.
The human need for art is present here. Man is a creature who not only lives, directs his choices rationally, pursues goals. He is also the only earthly being who reproduces the reality in which he is engaged. Our daily problems are never enough. We always multipy them by imagining variations on them. What would we do if...
If our doings were merely fugitive events, their meaning wholly exhausted by their occurrence, there would be no stories. But we know that what we do is decisive for who we are. The choices and decisions human agents make, particularly under great pressure, reveal what they are, they enforce or erode character.
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