Art (thoughts, ideas and their physical manifestations) serves to feed those further down the river.

Quotes

• “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key then another to cause vibration of the soul.” … Kandinsky
  Citation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Kandinsky

• It is often asked “What is beauty?” and the following quote by Goethe & other (unknown) has stuck by me for many years:
  “Goethe’s message of (the beautiful) beauty.
  Goethe grasps the beautiful neither as idea nor as a moral demand, but as a primal phenomenon of our being.”
  ……………………………………………………………………………
  “The beautiful is an archetypal phenomenon, which indeed never comes to appearance itself, but whose reflection becomes visible in a thousand different expressions of the work of the creating spirit, and is as manifold and various as nature herself.” (Goethe 18.04.1827)