Art is not for art's sake. Art, for Pete's sake, is a response to particulars of experience otherwise deflected, packaged, ignored, misunderstood. Inevitably runs up against inimical authorities, if there are any; inevitably outlives those conflicts; ineluctably represents crises of moral choice and vocation.

I'm getting this from Shattuck's book about Proust (who was, he says, often lumped, wrongly, with the purists).

If you're not an aesthete, does this mean you have to dumb down your rhetoric and vocabulary, write for someone other than yourself, become "accessible"? No; but by the same token, take care that your ornamentation, your felicities of style, are not merely designed to impress a coterie. They're not worth the trouble.