There they were, four plaster cherubim adorning our ceiling in the middle of our living room, their round faces and rounder bodies casting circular shadows against the white paint behind them. When my wife and I called our landlord to inquire about the fixture (and the possibility of removing it), they told us that the cherubs were a holdover from a time when the apartment was lit with gas, and a chandelier hung in the middle of the ceiling. It was historical (or so he said), so removing it wasn’t an option, nor was installing an electric light. We would have to make do with standing lamps and leave the angels there to flutter uselessly above us.
In the beginning, I hated them. They were grotesque in their own way, the way all cherubic art is a disturbing perversion of their Biblical counterparts and the children who serve as the basis for their form. Like the minotaur, their horror is rooted in their compromise: they sit somewhere between the human and the angelic, and their inability to decide, to be human or other, adds to their mystery and the unease I feel when I look at them. I prefer Ezekiel’s angels—burning, all eyes and wings, decidedly otherworldly and distant, untamed by the human imagination. But at some point we decided to turn angels into half-nude children with elderly faces floating on the clouds and playing harps.
As time passed and I grew used to their presence, I began to see them for what they were: a prophetic warning against the art that dominates our time. The cherubim are useless, devoid of function. Worse than that, they have outlived their usefulness. No chandelier hangs below them, and the old gas lines that funneled fuel to them are rusted and in disrepair. Despite this, they endure, a sign that some things still exist even if they have no practical value. They exist for their own sake, their aesthetic value triumphing over and against their practical virtues. In a world where NFTs exist and online hustle culture demands that talent must turn into profit, art is on the cusp of becoming like the dollar: a mere representation of perceived economic value used solely to exchange goods and services, devoid of wonder and relegated to the markets for mindless consumption, where dollar signs represent success and art is assessed for worth rather than contemplated for meaning.
Maybe that’s why the cherubim began to grow on me. For all their kitsch aesthetic, with their rotund bellies and blank faces, they existed in and for themselves. There was a nobility in their existence. They existed despite themselves as if for the sheer pleasure of existing. They were no longer a means to a marketable end. Their very presence was an act of defiance, a reminder that in a world obsessed with the “value” of things, art still exists for its own sake, beyond the interests of the bottom line.
The cherubim on my ceiling call us to consider what art might be beyond a system that calls for its monetization. They ask us to redefine our modern meanings of beauty, which aim not at consumption but at contemplation, experience over money. What if people learned to make for the sake of making? Not to make a quick buck or a second income but to simply enjoy the process of making and the beauty of a thing made? We can imagine the plaster artist carefully carving angels onto the ceiling of an apartment building, reveling in the work of his hands. Thomas Aquinas notes that the “good” in art is dependent on “the goodness of the work done.” He continues: “For a craftsman, as such, is commendable, not for the will with which he does a work, but for the quality of the work.” Here, Aquinas outlines that art ultimately needs to be assessed against itself. Its goodness is identified not with any value placed upon it but from its own intrinsic value. If the work is good, it is valuable because art “is nothing else but the right reason for certain works to be made.” So art exists as valuable outside of any economic system that seeks to denote its worth. The cherubim exist not because they are practical, nor because they possess some form of monetary value.
They are valuable precisely because they are devoid of any practical value. They played no role in selling us on the apartment, nor do they help make our lives easier. They simply exist. They exist for no other end but to be enjoyed, and there lies their value. Even if we ignored them they’d still be valuable. Because when we’re gone someone after us will rent this place. They will look up and see them for the first time. They may even find pleasure in their presence. It’s that exchange, that interaction between object and observer that gives art its value.
Aquinas’ value of aesthetics draws us to consider art for its own sake. To ask the question: is it good? and not: is it valuable? Art’s primary function is not the exchange of value but the exchange of meaning, communicating beyond itself to the artist and the onlooker. This transcendent exchange supersedes the market. It depends entirely on the artist and onlooker and the trade of meaning between them, their shared experience of the good. For “good” work is tied up in The Good, and any contemplation of temporal good leads us out and in to face the grand Good that undergirds all beauty. The plaster cherubim that adorn my ceiling no longer need to serve any practical purpose. They fulfilled their purpose when I looked upon them and divined something outside them. Their “usefulness,” if you can call it that, lay within their ability to clarify my sight, sight clouded by ideas of monetary “value” and pragmatic “usefulness.” In this they draw me out of myself and towards a contemplation of the good, “since the good is that which all things desire,” and the good properly understood exists for itself.
In reality, I could paint over them, obscure them with a new battery-operated fixture. I could again try to convince my landlord to tear them down, but I don’t think I will. In a world dominated by its need to assign dollars-and-cents value to things, it’s nice to have close at hand something utterly useless and infinitely valuable.