Today, provocations and transgressions of borders are celebrated as aestetic ideals. Early modernists like T S Eliot, Matisse and Schönberg, however, did not try to destroy tradition – but to reconquer it.
The disruptive, the transgressive and the disturbing are celebrated by the art of our time, with beauty often downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention. Qualities that previously denoted aesthetic failure are now cited as marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty is often regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge orthodoxy and to break free from conventional constraints. Arthur Danto has even argued that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. (The Abuse of Beauty.)
Published in Axess Magazine Issue no. 7, October 2008
Is beauty objective or subjective?
When we contemplate something, must there be an inherent beauty and is it impossible to argue that beauty is a value subject to personal inference? If a man-made object must be intentionally made beautiful for it to be successfully perceived as such, any innate aesthetic value it may have is objective. Beauty in this sense can only be found in mand-made objects and as such the natural world cannot be beautiful but only “good-looking”. Apart from the obvious question of who defines beauty, do you not consider the flight from beauty in art as reflective of the flight from beauty in the wider culture?
However, I would make the case that there is an objective standard of beauty we can all agree on, and that a systematic process of degradation is pushing it to the periphery of our world, and that the flight from beauty is something of which we are all guilty.
Dear Prof. Scruton, I don’t much disagree with what you say about the intent of the modernists. And Theodore Dalrymple makes easy fun of Warhol and Lichtenstein on the basis of your article. Fine. But I’d be interested to hear what you think of, say, Louise Bourgeois, who I think is the finest artist alive. This is so, for me, in purely formal terms, I’m not sure there is anything redeeming or dignifying in it. I know you admire Thomas Ades (but put him beside the truly pedestrian painter Jacob Collins in Culture Counts). I agree with the strand of opinion that says he’s maturing in the past few years – the Violin Concerto and Tevot are not quite like anything before, and a rejection of dessicated modernism and banal playfulness. But have you heard Gerald Barry’s opera The Intelligence Park? I think it’s beautiful. But it has an outlandish jokiness where the score mocks the libretto and vice versa. This is scattershot, but all I mean is that beauty lives on its own terms, and sometimes just happens without meaning, and is as much “une promesse de bonheur” in Standhal’s sense, as it is spiritual etc etc.
With goodwill,
Rory O’Connor
Sorry, let me go on and point out that I am emphatically an admirer of all the stuff that went on before the avant-garde. If you’ve been in the National Gallery of Ireland you’ll know Poussin’s “Acis and Galatea” which I posted on my blog with the headline “The Three Attitudes of Love”. I’m with the transcendent lovers Acis and Galatea. But with the mournful dejected fellow too. And the carnal festivallers (to a much lesser extent). Jacob Collins doesn’t attain to this in his imagination-free, but perfect reproductions from life.
Greetings Mr. Scruton,
Your article caused me to think about how, as a teacher of Language Arts (as we now call it), I try to share the art and beauty of our language. I am presently teaching poetry and its many forms to a class of middle school students. This is the fourth year that I have taught this subject. I begin by sharing with the class a few different examples of the possible techniques and formats that poets use for expression. The students then practice these techniques by writing poems of their own. We begin with simple end rhyme schemes (ABAB, ABBA, etc.), then on to ballads and sonnets, limericks always seem captivate the class for some reason, and eventually we find ourselves with more complicated formats such as villanelles and rubaiyat. The students do well with the various formats (many of whom, to my astonishment, can not get enough of the challenge of the villanelle), conforming their own inspiration to the prescribed rhythms and rhyme schemes. I then conclude our exploration in poetry with the practice of free verse. I originally assumed that any student would prefer an assignment with no definite rules or expectations. This has certainly not been the case, however. The reason—so far as I have ascertained—is that students initially feel that to write in free verse is to avoid or even destroy the patterns that occur naturally with the words that spill on to their pages. Shunning these patterns, and creating work that is random and meaningless, seems to violate some visceral inclination within each of them. And so the struggle begins—not to change their inclination towards patterns, but rather to show students the subtle and complex patterns that occur within (good) free verse poetry. They find themselves at ease with free verse only when they realize that the purpose is not to destroy the natural patterns of expression but rather to find their own.
ps-I am sorry to see that you have not reserved a section for fox hunting within your new site, as it was this that brought me to your work originally.
-KM Parentin
[...] the original: The Flight from Beauty This entry is filed under Europa, Roger Scruton. You can follow any responses to this entry [...]
I can tell that this is not the first time you mention the topic. Why have you chosen it again?
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
Great one. Thanks for sharing
I just saw, and very much enjoyed “Why Beauty Matters”, good work sir.
One thing I have wondered about is the role of popular culture in recent decades, as “high” art has drifted towards the bizarre and ugly. I wonder if popular musicians and artists have filled this space with unusually ambitious works of their own.
For example, while modern high brow music grows difficult and unwieldy, popular music gives us Pink Floyd. As modern paintings become offensive, boring and baffling, comic books become ever more ambitious. See how the Batman story has risen from camp silliness in the 1960s TV show to deadly serious, socially-aware fantasy in the 2000s.
So perhaps traditionally low-brow genres like comic books and heavy metal are trying to fill the gap left by traditionally high-brow genres.
Thank you for your defence of beauty broadcast on BBC 2 last night. I had intended to watch the programme in any event, but I was incensed by the unintelligent discussion of it earlier that evening on Radio 4′s Saturday Review programme, which betrayed a truly appalling inability on the part of the participant reviewers to identify, let alone assess, an argument.
I appreciate that you had limited time at your disposal, but I think you should have addressed issues of self-reference, play and humour, since there is good art in (e.g.) the comedies of Aristophanes, which refer to and parody the tragedies of Euripides.
Playing with sounds, words and mimetic effects, I suggest, lies at the root of artistic creativity and the development of forms of artistic expression. (Cf. Aristotle, for example, on the natural pleasures of imitation, harmony and rhythm.)
It seems to me that contemporary art, in large part, is consonant with the popular moods of knowing cynicism (which tends to anything goes relativism) and hedonism (life is about having fun).
Given the views that self-awareness is just cynicism and the meaning of life is fun, your defence of the need to cultivate the sense of beauty will be dismissed as humourless and prescriptive. I think you would buttress your position by discussing humour in art.
In the age of the internet and living alone only with my computer not wishing to argue I wait….Please I need to see this again.. Why Beauty Matters when all else fails us