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bogus comments on The mystery of Brahms - Less Wrong Discussion
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A lot of art is not made either to reinforce societal truths or to subvert them. If it's made for any purpose, it's just to look pretty. This applies especially to the more "ornamental" and "decorative" arts and crafts. This sort of art is not talked about much, precisely because it does not deal much with "society's traditional and transcendent truths" (whatever that means) so it's harder to say anything worthwhile about it, but it's probably a lot more important and salient to most folks than things like painting or sculpture, which are what first comes to mind when talking about "art".
When I say "the fine arts", I'm trying to exclude all that, and talk about the stuff that gets studied in college and written about in journals, and whose artists used to be patronized by nobility and now get invited to parties in Manhattan.
True, but it's not clear that it should be excluded, especially when talking about things like decor. For that matter, one could argue that even the cheapest and most trivial cultural artifact reflects the society it is a product of, and to this extent it is "subservient" to social truths. And even the most "subversive" art ends up saying a lot about the way our society actively celebrates some sort of subversion. Which is certainly a social truth that has its own notable legacy and perhaps even "tradition".
When the question is how artists are accepted into the canon defined by the elite gatekeepers--the journal editors, the critics, the department chairs at major universities--then those things should be excluded, because they aren't part of the phenomenon being studied. They are more strongly governed by different rules.