The Artistic Life

"The art gallery or art museum theory of art to which philanthropists and promoters would persuade us views art as a luxury quite beyond the reach of ordinary people. Its attempt to glorify the arts by setting them aside in specially consecrated shrines can hardly supply more than a superficial gilding to a national culture, if the private direction of that culture is ugly and materialistic–Keyserling would say, animalistic. The proposition is as absurd as this: Should we eat our meals regularly from crude, think dishes like those used in Greek restaurant, but go on solemn occasions to a restaurant museum where somebody's munificence would permit us to enjoy a meal on china of the most delicate design? The truly artistic life is surely that in which the æsthetic experience is not curtained off but is mixed up with all sorts of instruments and occupations pertaining to the round of daily life."
-Donald Davidson "A Mirror for Artists" I'll Take My Stand (1930)

The Incarnation of Religion

"We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people."
-T.S. Eliot (Christianity and Culture, 1948)