I just wanted to draw attention to this interview in order to highlight this quote:

Artists are not necessarily intellectuals. Intellectuals produce ideas. Artists produce beauty.

Obviously, I am taking this out of context, but even within the context, it doesn’t address the final sentence.

Do artists necessarily create beauty? Is there no great and compelling art which is not beautiful? Political art, art that comments on civilization’s failings. Are they then not the work of artists, at all, but of intellectuals trading in ideas disguised as art?

I don’t have the answer, but I firmly believe that if you limit the function of art to creating beauty, you are putting very unsettling limits upon it, indeed.