Early-21st-century Christian defenses of art often turn on enthusiasm for art's uselessness: to defend art is to defend utterly supernumerary beauty. Planet Earth, with all its seemingly purposeless aesthetic whimsy—glow-in-the-dark fish, majestic mountains, peacock's plumage—is adduced as evidence that our creator God is interested in extravagant, useless beauty, that God made beautiful things just for kicks. Many since Kant have argued for purposeless beauty, and certainly the argument has force, especially for Christians who grew up in communities where beauty was suspect, where anything other than kneel-and-pray-the-sinner's-prayer-right-now evangelism was considered a waste of time. Apologia for senseless beauty are compelling insofar as they dissent from our society's tendency to instrumentalize and to reductively, perniciously measure everything (and everyone) in utilitarian terms.

—Lauren F. Winner, "The Art Patron," in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church