A quote from Agnes Callard in an essay Art Is for Seeing Evil
There is a certain noble lie that we tell students about art. I was told it, and I hear it retold often by those defending great books and humanistic education. The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man. But those are the goods of friendship, or education, or politics, or religion—not of art. The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life. When art does transparently aim at moral guidance or social progress we dismiss it as dogmatic, pedantic and servile.
Art is a window through which we might catch a glimpse of the darkness and so be enabled to refuse it; Ozzy was never promoting hell, just telling us the address. John Wick doesn’t really want to shoot everybody in the head twice, but seeing him do it allows us to see just what Rules and Consequences can mean.