Protestantism and Art

Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot possibly be good, I think to myself. This cannot possibly be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow to be called a true artistic experience. …
This take on art is clearly Protestant, since a genuinely Protestant person such as myself, for whom Protestantism is part of the marrow, can appreciate only what has come of hard work, only this has value, and holds nothing but disdain for what is given or easily taken, which is associated with sloth, idleness, indolence.

Karl Ove Knausgård, “Inexhaustible Precision,” 40–41.