From Terry Teachout’s About Last Night blog – a great quote on the mysteries of art:

It is perhaps the unique capacity of art that its most monumental achievements manage to embrace and resolve polarities which, in other areas of life–including philosophy–seem hopelessly unbridgeable: positive and void, the boundary between subjective and objective worlds. Where such resolution fails, or is not even attempted, art degenerates into decoration, on one hand, or illustration–the vast gap between object and idea that plagues so much contemporary art. Where it succeeds, we approach perhaps as near as we can come to grasping the way of things.
Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists