The American Spectator : On Defending Beauty

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On Defending Beauty

By Roger Scruton from the May 2010 issue

Almost getting away with it on the BBC.

For better or worse I have been identified by the British establishment as the person who can be relied upon to defend the indefensible, and who might be allowed to defend the indefensible even on state television (that is, the BBC) provided the defense is sufficiently diluted by others defending the obvious. In official code, "indefensible" means "conservative," while "obvious" means "left-liberal." Hence when the BBC asked me to contribute to a television series on beauty it was expected that I would argue that there really is such a thing, that it is not just a matter of taste, that it is connected with the noble, the aspirational, and the holy in our feelings, and that the postmodern culture, which emphasizes ugliness, despondency, and desecration, is a betrayal of a sacred calling. So that is what I said, since after all they were paying me. To achieve the balance that the BBC is required by its constitution to deliver, two other programs were commissioned, reaffirming the orthodoxies. They argued that art is not about beauty but about originality, and originality means putting yourself on display, with the tongue, or some other suitable organ, sticking out.

In Why Beauty Matters I talked a bit about art, but I was more concerned to draw attention to the place of beauty in everyday life -- in manners, clothes, interior decoration, and ordinary vernacular buildings. I criticized both the functional concrete and glass architecture that has destroyed cities all over the world and the self-centered manners that have done the same to domestic life. I tried to explain why the philosophers of the Enlightenment followed Shaftesbury in placing beauty at the center of the new code of secular values. For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and their followers, I suggested, beauty was the path back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God -- the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly human and truly meaningful. And I went on to argue that, since the puerile jokes of Marcel Duchamp, repeated again and again in every art-school graduate exhibition in Britain, a habit of sarcasm and desecration had overcome the practice of visual art.

Hence British artists today -- at least those recognized by the official culture -- have nothing much to show us except how repulsive they are. It seemed to me obvious that Delacroix's painting of his unmade bed (in the Maison Delacroix in Paris) is a true work of art, which shows something about mankind's spiritual condition, while Tracey Emin's famous bed (in the Tate Modern gallery in London) is just an unmade bed. We can deduce from the sight of this bed quite a lot about the person who unmade it, but that does not distinguish it from any other piece of debris left in the wake of a human life. The higher meaning that is the aim of art -- the meaning that shows why life matters -- is something that this bed neither achieves nor aims for.

I received more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, "Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said," half of them adding, "but how did you get away with it on the BBC?" Meanwhile the reviewers ganged up to lament the sad, anomalous, and reactionary character of poor Scruton, and to thank the BBC for showing the absurdity and outdatedness of the aged professor's views. Waldemar Januszczak, who made another of the films in the series on beauty, mounted a libelous character assassination in the Sunday Times in order to advise his readers, in advance of the showing of my film, to dismiss me and whatever I might try to say to them.

The episode was, for me, an instructive glimpse into my country and its culture. I don't say that my film had any merit beyond its honesty. But it produced overwhelming proof that its vision of art and the aesthetic is shared by many ordinary British viewers, and that the official culture is not just detached from such people but profoundly hostile to what they believe, what they feel, and what they hope for. The nihilistic art of our time is delivered to the British people as a rebuke, which they are to accept in all humility, and in a spirit of apology for having wanted something "higher." There is nothing higher -- that is the lesson to be gleaned from Young British Art, and from the heaps of nonsensical garbage that it has delivered to our museums and galleries. We can understand the human condition, it tells us, only if we adopt a posture of rudeness and confrontation, and if we let those tongues stick out.

THIS IS JUST ONE ASPECT of something that American visitors to Britain increasingly remark upon. In the '50s and '60s, when my generation was growing up, British people were actively recruited by the educational system and the worlds of art and religion to an aspirational culture. Those were the days of Henry Moore and Benjamin Britten, of Graham Sutherland and Michael Tippett. W. H. Auden was an important voice, as was the ex-American T. S. Eliot. Britain was a place of deep historical and religious significance. You were privileged to belong on its soil, and all around you the national history had left the signs and portents of a higher way of life. At the risk of exaggeration, it could be said that my country, in those years when the baby boom generation was advancing toward its lifelong immaturity, was an experiment in redemption. Its art, culture, and religion were devoted to the ideal of a community in which decency, puzzlement, and self-denial held sway. And there remained, as a kind of leftover from wartime propaganda, the belief in the gentleman, who faces life in a posture of self-sacrificing devotion to nonsensical ideals -- nonsensical, that is, from the point of view of the cynical observer, but not nonsensical at all, given the spirit in which they were accepted.

The American visitor to Britain today, and especially the visitor who retains a memory of that extraordinary world in which decency, self-deprecation, and the stiff upper lip were the ruling principles, often recoils in shock at what he finds. The public culture is one of appetite and satire, and the whole country seems to be "in your face," as though sticking out a collective tongue. Many American friends tell me this, and speak sorrowfully of the change from the Britain that they used to visit with a sense of coming home, to the Britain that they visit today, which is a land of strangers. The interesting thing, however, and the response to my film seems to confirm this, is that many of the British people agree with them. The British people too are in a land of strangers, and the culture that rules over them is one to which many of my countrymen cannot in their hearts belong.

The official ethos, which prevails in schools and universities, and also in the Labour Party, is one of scorn and repudiation toward the old ideals. Official British culture is accurately portrayed by Tracey Emin's bed. It is a culture of emotional chaos and random affections, in which traditional loyalties play no part. Emin herself is the illegitimate daughter of a Turkish Cypriot, and her situation is typical of her generation. Unable to identify with a country or a way of life, educated by a curriculum of multicultural fairy tales, and learning in art school that you find your place in the world through transgression, and through putting the self on display, she has had the good sense to be a publicly visible and authentic mess. Her works may not be works of art, in the sense that my generation was brought up to understand this honorific label, but they show a world that the official culture of Britain has chosen to endorse.

The circumstantial evidence of the response to my film proves nothing. All I know is that a lot of people out there feel as I do. They agree with me that beauty matters, that desecration and nihilism are crimes, and that we should find the way to exalt our world and to endow it with a more than worldly significance. But perhaps just as many or more believe the official "multicultural" story, which tells us that there is nothing special about Britain, that the old ideals and dignities are mere illusions, and that the purpose of art is to pour scorn on the values of antiquated people. And if the impression of American visitors is right, it is not the official culture only, but also the rising generation of New Brits, which has settled for facetiousness against dignity and transgression against the norms of social life. If this is so, then at least one part of the message of my film has been vindicated: namely that beauty matters, and that you cannot pour scorn on beauty without losing sight of the meaning of life.

About the Author

Roger Scruton is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford University Press).

Letter to the Editor View all comments (37) | Leave a comment

Andrew B| 5.15.10 @ 6:40PM

I have always felt that modern art was designed to make regular people feel stupid and inferior. At the same time, it is supposed to elevate the artist and his admirers onto an altogether higher plane. That is not art, but thuggery.

I am a former museum director married to an opera singer, but I am supposed to feel foolish for preferring an 18th century landscape painting over a dead shark in preservative.

Nope, sorry. I'm not going to buy it.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 10:20AM

But we are somewhat missing the point concerning beauty: Mapplethorpe, just for one, was supposed to be revolting, and destructive of beauty-- not to mention self-destructive. Calling modern art nasty is like attending a Rock concert and remarking, "golly, aren't these performers rather loud?"
Rock is supposed to be offensively loud.

Modern art is Supposed to be offensive to the eye. that's the whole point; the medium is the mundaneness.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 10:28AM

PS,
Here is something even you can appreciate (you are a tad injured-innocence)
A gullible liberal goes to hockey game and says, "gosh, these men are so violent, how can they hit each other like that??"
Or say they attend a boxing match and go up on into the ring: "oh dear! why do you punch each other like that??"

And modern art, saying it is ugly is like telling Lucky Luciano he is a criminal.

Mark| 5.17.10 @ 12:09PM

Nope, you got it wrong, Allan. Modern art denies there is such a thing as beauty. Therefore, there is nothing to destroy.

Thom Burke| 5.17.10 @ 2:30PM

Your approach, Mark, is understandable, especially in rebutal to Allen's nonsense, but consider the notion that while talent plus imagination is art, talent without imagination is mere craftsmanship, but imagination without talent is modern art.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 2:44PM

Mencken knew better than Thom Burke;
the Sage knew that Americans are innately tasteless and always will be.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 2:46PM

...Thom, you don't need to go to a gallery to be offended; merely look at the gunk on TV, listen to the slop on hate radio.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 5:13PM

PS, Thom,
would you have told Jackson Pollack:

"Jack, your canvases are rather unsymmetrical in appearance"?

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 5:14PM

oops, Pollock. Got his name confused with Alan Pollack.

Irish22| 5.17.10 @ 5:23PM

We Americans are not tasteless . . . we taste like chicken! (sorry, a tasteless joke I know) On a more serious note . . . A boss of mine used to say, "Raise the bridge or lower the water." Believing in nothing above worthy of raising the bridge, the liberals/progressives have chosen to lower the water. Hence, the stench of nihilism from the sewer they call art!

Unger | 5.17.10 @ 6:54PM

Thom Burke's comment would probably hold true for modern art, but post-modern art is a different beast, it doesn't need talent or imagination. Instead it depends on insight, which would be fine if the artist was insightful. Over all I think post-modernism was an interesting attempt to move art forward, but I think now no one can seriously deny that it has been a failure.

Tomas| 5.17.10 @ 8:55PM

Thom:

Even the craftsmanship isn't a guarantee.

Remember Robert Maplethorpe? That thing he did called "Piss Christ;" the Crucifix in the jar of urine? Pissed off a lot of Christians (no pun intended). That was his intent.

During the controversy Bill Moyers interviewed Sister Wendy Beckett, an art expert. He asked her about "Piss Christ," intending to get a rise out of Sister Wendy, her being a Catholic Nun.

Her response: "Well, he isn't very good, is he."

The debate was over, the situation diffused. And Moyers looked like a fool.

This is the crux of the biscuit when it comes to most modern art: it's not very good. Shock and awe, a name, toeing the "artist" line. You can fool most of the people most of the time, bot not Sister Wendy.

We need more like her.

I went to an art school. One of the favorite questions people liked to bandy about was, "what is Art?" Very hard to answer. Which is why many modern artists get away with their crap.

The question, "What is not art" is easier to answer. But asking it is not allowed. Can you guess why?

Belinda Gomez| 5.26.10 @ 2:37PM

Mapplethorp didn't do Piss Christ. Andres Serrano did.

If you're going to criticize this stuff, get the facts right.

Brian Mc| 5.17.10 @ 7:30AM

The decadent immaturity of the 'artworld' seems to be a natural spin-off of the cultural revolution that devolved out of the seventies with everyone vying to prove that they can be uglier and more hedonistic than the last. The specimens on display appear to have sprung from the mind of bitterly angry young boys whose testes have failed to drop. And like modern liberalism, we are meant to accept the perverse dichotomies against decency, or else. No more allowed to view the natural harmonious results from fertilization but compelled to stare with our eyelids peeled back at the actual source of the fertilizer...while some proponent whispers in our ear, "That is art".

Bill| 5.17.10 @ 9:31AM

When Scruton says that modern artists "...show a world that the official culture of Britain has chosen to endorse," he hits the nail precisely on the head, and displays why it will be a battle to bring Western civilization back to the course that brought it pre-eminence in the world. We have chosen to exalt originality over gracefulness.

The rest of the world sees that, and part of it has declared war on us for making that choice in that way. We will pay a price for it.

dsayne| 5.17.10 @ 10:02AM

There is a thin fine line between art and Bull***t. Unfortunately, most "artists" today operate far on the BS side of the line.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 5:17PM

Because-- it needn't be written-- dsayne, the masses want it; like bad Rock, bad TV, and bad porn.

No one goes broke underestimating bad taste.

Richard| 5.17.10 @ 10:15AM

The human soul hungers for beauty unless that human soul is a warped and degenerate leftist one. Further that hunger was combined with a vision of the higher, the transcendent, that is the divine. I have no doubt that our degenerate leftists will join the historical ash-heap but perhaps no soon enough.

Alan Brooks| 5.17.10 @ 5:22PM

"I have no doubt that our degenerate leftists will join the historical ash-heap but perhaps no soon enough."

No, Rich. You should know as a conservative that though ongoing material progress is possible, in fact very likely, we will never know a virtuous world.

Doug Lee| 5.17.10 @ 11:02AM

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth,--the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms.
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Does the present generation -- in England or the US -- have any hope whatsoever of understanding this poem? Liberal/Progressives deride truth and beauty equally; the concepts are an anathema to them. Beauty and truth belong the realm of "good," and thus evil attacks.

Paul| 5.17.10 @ 11:30AM

Funny that the more leftists and left-leaning "artists" show contempt for the traditional values of Western civilization, the more Muslims see Western civilization as decadent and worthy of contempt...

Hal G. P. Colebatch| 5.17.10 @ 11:52AM

I doubt even satire is a lively part of the public high culture now. There is no uneroded viewpint left to satirise. All the remains is a sort of childish Nihilism.

Bill A| 5.17.10 @ 5:51PM

The sadder truth is that Steve Colbert and John Daly and their like do shows that are satirical.
The bigger problem is that most of their viewers treat these shows as "real" news. In todays society sarcasm has replaced true wit. Noone knows what risque is , and you know they could not spell it.
This is a generation that seeks information but not knowledge. "Like I totally tried to think but it was way two much trouble, Dude." !

dan| 5.17.10 @ 8:59PM

sorry,you forgot to sign the quote: Obama voter

Gr0w1er| 5.17.10 @ 12:35PM

Fear and self-loathing. All part of the liberal/progressive guilt- trip mindset. That it surfaces in the visual arts is almost redundant.

JP| 5.17.10 @ 2:36PM

Beauty is just one of the transcendtals which Western Culture was based. Like Truth, Beauty had to go. Art quickly descended into the morass of pop culture and nihilsm once Truth was officially cast off its throne. The post-modern, like Pontious Pilot, asks, "What is Truth?" And like Pilot, he is not really interested in it.

No thinking person today follows the art world today. Yes, wealthy patrons from Malibu, The Upper Westside, and Mayfair buy and sell art; they publish thier art journals, spend fortunes, and create theories. But it is just Kitsch for the Rich.

The philistines with thier Velvet Elvis' and Kincaid prints have more a connection with our cultural history of our society than the idle rich and trust fund babies who patronize the MoMa.

Tony in Central PA| 5.17.10 @ 3:48PM

I'm not sure how much of it is a cause or an association, but things have certainly become uglier in the art world as feminity has been degraded.

Tony in Central PA| 5.17.10 @ 3:52PM

I meant " femininity ".
But think about the portrayals of women recently versus historically. There seems to be a prize for behaving like a man, and not a well - mannered one at that. So the next time you see a loud, tattooed, obnoxious young woman remind yourself she's a work of modern art.

Ed| 5.17.10 @ 4:05PM

It looks like Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" was prescient after all. British culture had always been influenced by Chrisitianity, until the period between WWI and WWII. Now, there is not much left, except for the Droogs.

Tony in Central PA| 5.17.10 @ 5:18PM

Ed, it was noteworthy that you brought up " A Clockwork Orange " . I actually read the book. The protagonist weighed in on the various assessments of the societal decline of his world over which the adults were continually engaged. He said they had it all wrong, that the real reason was that " The devil was abroad ". Modern intellectuals, especially those defining what constitutes good art, deny the reality of evil.

Eden Maxwell| 5.17.10 @ 5:48PM

I’m both a painter and writer; I learned a long time ago that an artist has no medium, no thing is obvious, and that no thing goes without saying.

Here are few relevant thoughts on ‘Why Beauty Matters’ gleaned from my latest book, An Artist Empowered. The psychologist Abraham Maslow understood that people need beauty in their lives if they are to be healthy self-realized individuals.

1) Learning to make sense of the world through images and words is a lengthy and complex process that becomes hardwired in the visual cortex and language center of the brain. If you can convince people that an unmade bed installation deserves attention and belongs in a museum, then you are one hell of a marketer. The conceptual artist is saying, hey, this is what I think art looks like. Art, however, is a magical feeling that can’t be measured with a ruler.

2) Haven’t we read that truth is beauty, and beauty truth. We should also note that honesty (baring your self-proclaimend deceptions), is not necessarily truth.

3) In his 1973 documentary Painters Painting, filmmaker Emile de Antonio interviewed many of the figures, including Barnett Newmann, who, after the Second World War, had fueled the abstract expressionism movement in New York City. Barnett: “Yes, because many years ago at a conference in Woodstock that was held with a panel consisting of philosophers—esthetes, really, professors of philosophy, professors of esthetics—and artists, I declared that even if they were right, and even if they could build a system, an esthetic system that they could claim explained the activity, the creative activity, it would be of no value, because esthetics for the artist was as meaningful as ornithology must be for the birds.”

T1Brit| 5.17.10 @ 5:52PM

It's true that Duchamp opened up a kind of Pandoras box. But It is not true that all that has come of it is rubbish designed to shock.
Modern art can be breathtaking and thought provoking in a way that an 18th century landscape can never hope to be. You do the Epsteins and the Rothkos and the Hirsts wrong to lump them together with the Tracey Emins.
The floating shark ( The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living ) may not be to your taste. But It is interesting to me and sets my mind to work. Art can do more than just be beautiful.

Greystead| 5.18.10 @ 12:33PM

I agree that "Art can do more than just be beautiful", but would argue that without being beautiful, an object on display is not truly Art. Hirst's shark may make you think about mortality and be "intersting" but that does not make it anymore than an glorified conversation piece.

Publius| 5.18.10 @ 5:35PM

Yes and the conversation would most likely occur between two burned out hippies, who (having just shared the paltry remains of a roach), declare simultaneously, "dude, that is deep."

Jim Wilson| 5.18.10 @ 6:30PM

I think the definition of art is a deceit that illustrates (or attempts to illustrate) truth. If you lose the truth side of the equation all you're left with is a deceit, which quickly turns into a conceit.

Part of the problem with the modern era comes not from ignorance but from education. Everybody wants a hidden truth, something arcane and difficult to learn, so that anyone who figures it out is special.

Representational art forms don't give much room for arcana, so that we have Dan Brown inventing vast conspiracies contained in a painting, thus redeeming the Mona Lisa from being just ordinary representation.

Much of art is devoted to the idea that beauty is itself a truth, which is why there is so much representative/mimetic art. The artist is trying to bring to light hidden beauties, maybe, but no deeper meaning than that. Beauty is not dead because modern art killed it, but because the French/Prussian enlightenment killed the idea of truth as a modern belief. If you don't believe in truth, then beauty has no higher meaning.

Naturally plenty of us refuse to go along for the ride. The paintings in a Dungeons & Dragons book are better than what hangs in art galleries today, and they're not exactly mimetic either. I haven't seen any elves or dragons running around lately, though maybe that's just me.

WAKE UP| 5.18.10 @ 10:12PM

Art does not lead the world, it reflects it: if the "art" is a mess, so is the milieu that produced it. The point being: rather than worrying about the art, we should be addressing the underlying cause/s.