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This basic distinction, incidentally, explains the disquiet of many people about the inclusion in the Olympics of athletic perperformances whose appeal is partly artistic: ice dancing, synchronized swimming, gymnastic displays. The hundred-meter dash has a winner by a single criterion: whoever runs the fastest. A single success-criterion that known in advance is the hallmark of a craft. Sports that include of grace and style, however, cannot have a single criterion winning, so committees use complicated points systems to evaluate such events. The seeming objectivity of a points system is a facade, of course, that tries to hide the fact that winners in these events are decided in judgments of aesthetic taste, which invites inevitable disputes. What makes ice dancing and gymnastics among the most pop ular Olympic events is precisely that, unlike the long jump or weight lifting, they highly virtuosic artistic displays not entirely assessable by preconceived criteria. It also makes their judging fraught with controversy.

3. The arts are not essentially religious or moral or politi cal. The open, probing character of the arts also means that, while they are suffused with emotion and value, they will never stand comfortably alongside other human value systems. Religion, ethics, and politics all require some degree adherence to a conceptual stability that even the most conformist artists may wish to test. The arts never quite fit with the moral demands on which any functioning society depends.

Religions have availed themselves of the arts since the Paleolithic caves. The attention-grabbing nature of art, its ritual and ceremonial potential, its ability to tell compelling stories, and the sense in which complexities pleasur ably tax the mind up to and beyond the limits conduct, such as sports or cuisine. It is no wonder, therefore, much of the finest art of history has religious meaning, from Parthenon and Chartres to the Taj Mahal and the Rothko Chapel, from the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost through the German to The Brothers Karamazov. Religious feelings deeply affect millions of people, and the history of aesthetic theory includes assertions that the oceanic, transcendent feelings that the arts can induce are essence the same as feelings derived from spiritual devotion. Very many religious believers who are art lovers feel that art is essentially religious.

Because moral values are seen across the world as issuing from religion, and because storytelling is such an important means to inculcate moral values, it is no surprise that morality becomes another element interplay of art and religion, along with politics. Governments arts to convey and bolster moral and political values. Artists for their part use art works to express moral sentiments and make political statements. Audiences in their turn make moral judgments about artists works of art, as do politicians, prelates, and censors. The fictional heroes villains in narrative art works invite moral evaluation. How works stand in relation to traditions and the values they embody can regarded as having a moral dimension.

In this endlessly complex set of interactions, there is no evidence is essentially religious, or that literary or aesthetic experience of kind will improve us morally. The phi losopher Martha Nussbaum years championed the notion that literature—and, by implication, films and other narrative media—has the capacity to broaden the imagination, expose us fictionally to exemplary moral conduct, condition emotions, and provide us with moral guidance. In a well-known debate with her, Richard Posner, a federal judge and legal theorist, has that there is no evidence that literary critics and En glish majors more morally refined than other mortals or that literary works general have the edifying effects Nussbaum claims for them. Posner to the contrary that literature sets before readers many of the worst examples possible. Classic literature is full of moral atrocities that sometimes approve of and often present as the