Roger Scruton, Why Beauty Matters (2009); BBC Scotland (Click image for video) Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton has much to say about the importance of beauty and its erosion in modern times that resonates with me. Not that I concur with all he has to say. Scruton’s concept of beauty and the sacred, while it [...]

$ AUD

Roger Scruton, Why Beauty Matters (2009); BBC Scotland

(Click image for video)

Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton has much to say about the importance of beauty and its erosion in modern times that resonates with me. Not that I concur with all he has to say. Scruton’s concept of beauty and the sacred, while it rightly sees transcendental foundations, devolves into romantic mysticism rather than finding its proper ground in the ultimate locus of beauty – the Lord himself. That being said, Scruton makes some excellent and telling points in his analysis and my own heart was stirred to place higher value on beauty. In a world that so often values ugliness and utility in place of beauty I am moved by Paul’s exhortation: “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is LOVELY, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). There is an appreciation of beauty that transcends the experience of even those sensitive to expressions of beauty in the arts – a depth of beauty only perceived by those who know the Lord, as captured in George W. Robinson’s great hymn, Loved with Everlasting Love:

Heav’n above is softer blue, Earth around is sweeter green!

Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen;

Birds with gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine,

Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.

Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.

Plato pondered:

But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty – the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life – thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life? (Symposium)

Would then that David’s longing be ours (the ultimate nexus of the sacred and beauty):

One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple (Psalm 27:4)

_______

Here is the transcript of Scruton’s documentary on beauty:

At any time between 1750 and 1930 if you asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied “beauty.” And if you had asked for the point of that you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness. Then in the 20th century beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty but originality however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes. Not only has art made a cult of ugliness. Architecture too has become soul-less and sterile. And it is not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly. Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered and offensive as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. One word is written large on all these ugly things and that word is “Me.” My profits, my desires, my pleasures. And art has nothing to say in response to this except “Yeah, go for it!”

I think we are losing beauty and there is a danger that with it we will lose the meaning of life. I’m Roger Scruton, philosopher and writer. My trade is to ask questions. During the last few years I have been asking questions about beauty. Beauty has been central to our civilisation for over 2000 years. From its beginnings in ancient Greece philosophy has reflected on the place of beauty in art, poetry, music, architecture and everyday life. Philosophers have argued that through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home. We also come to understand our own nature as spiritual beings. But our world has turned its back on beauty and because of that we find ourselves surrounded by ugliness and alienation.

I want to persuade you that beauty matters; that it is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert. I want to show you the path out of that desert. It is a path that leads to home.

The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this and the name of that remedy was “Beauty.” The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.

Many modern artists have become weary of this sacred task. The randomness of modern life, they think, cannot be redeemed by art. Instead it should be displayed. The pattern was set nearly a century ago by the French artist Marcel Duchamp who signed a urinal with a fictitious signature “R. Mutt” and entered it for an exhibition. His gesture was satirical, designed to mock the world of art and the snobberies that go with it. But it has been interpreted in another way - a showing that anything can be art like a light going on and off (so Martin Creed: Works No. 227 The Lights Going On and Off, 2000); a can of excrement (so Piero Manzoni: Artist’s Shit, 1961) or even a pile of bricks. No longer does art have a sacred status. No longer does it raise us to a higher moral or spiritual plane. It is just one human gesture among others; no more meaningful than a laugh or a shout.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. Since the world is disturbing, art should be disturbing too. Those who look for beauty in art are just out of touch with modern realities. Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time round is boring and vacuous when repeated. This makes art into an elaborate joke but into one that by now has ceased to be funny. Yet the critics go on endorsing it, afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Creative art is not achieved just like that, simply by having an idea. Of course, ideas can be interesting and amusing, but this doesn’t justify the appropriation of the label “Art.” If a work of art is nothing more than an idea then anybody can be an artist and any object can be a work of art. There is no longer any need for skill, taste or creativity.

Interview with Marcel Duchamp

Interviewer: “What you were also intending to do, as I understand it, was to devalue the art as an object, simply by saying, ‘If I say this is a work of art that makes it a work of art.’” Duchamp: “Yeah, but the word “work of art” is not so important for me. I don’t care about the word “art” because it has been so discredited, as it were.” Interviewer: “But you in fact contributed to the discrediting, didn’t you? Quite deliberately.” Duchamp: “Deliberately, yeah. I want to get rid of it, because in a way many people today have done away with religion.”

People accepted Duchamp at his own valuation. But I think he did not get rid of art. He just got rid of creativity. However, Duchamp’s works are still influencing the course of art today. Artist Michael Craig-Martin who taught several of the young British artists whose works dominate the art world followed Duchamp’s example with his own seminal work called “An Oak Tree” (1973). This consists of a glass of water on a shelf with a text explaining why it is an oak tree.

Scruton’s Conversation with Michael Craig-Martin

Scruton: “When I first entered St. Peter’s and confronted Michelangelo’s Pieta for me that was a transforming experience. My life was changed by this. Do you think someone can have the same experience with Duchamp’s Urinal or perhaps with your Oak Tree, which after all is a similar thing.” Craig-Martin: “When I was a teenager and first came upon Duchamp and first came upon the ready-mades I was absolutely stunned in amazement. I don’t think people are overwhelmed by a sense of beauty when they see the Urinal. It’s not meant to be beautiful. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something about it that doesn’t captivate the imagination. And I think ‘captivate the imagination’ is the key to what art seeks to do. Duchamp felt that art had become too interested in technique, too interested in optics. He felt that it had become intellectually and morally corrupt. His reason for making an art work that didn’t fit the system was not cynicism. It was in order to say “I am trying to make an art that denies all of the things that people say art should have because I am trying to say that the central question of art rest somewhere else.” Scruton: “I take it that things had to change and Duchamp was trying to change them. But what was he trying to change them to?” Craig-Martin: “Well, he could never in his wildest dreams have imagined that what would happen would happen. He himself had no idea how central the thing was he had stumbled upon – essentially that a work of art is a work of art because we think of it as such. I also think it is important to say that the notion of beauty has been extended to include things that would not have been thought of – that’s part of the artist’s function, to make one see something as beautiful that no one thought was beautiful until now.” Scruton: “Right, like a can of shit?” Craig-Martin: “Well, I’m not sure it’s beautiful – it’s not trying to be beautiful. But take as an example Jeff Koons. Some of his works are astoundingly beautiful.” [Shown “Balloon Dog (2003)] Scruton: “Well, it looks like kitsch to me – with sugar on.” Craig-Martin: “That’s the subject of his work, not the substance of his work.” Scruton: “What is the use of this art? What does it help people to do?” Craig-Martin: “I think, hopefully, it allows people to see the world in which they are living in a way that gives it more meaning to them. And it’s not the world of an ideal world of some other world, some better place but of the here and now, the world that they’re in and they’re trying to live more at ease in the world in which they are living.”

So the art of today shows us the world as it is – the here and now and all its imperfections. But is the result really art. Surely something is not a work of art simply because it offers a slice of reality – ugliness included – and calls itself art.

Art needs creativity and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images. Nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art. But creativity is not enough and the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it. This is what Michelangelo achieves in his great portrayal of David. But when we encounter a concrete cast of the David as part of some garden arrangement it is not beautiful at all, for it lacks the essential ingredient of creativity.

Discussions of the kind I have been having are dangerous. In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person’s taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to. But this doesn’t help anybody. There are standards of beauty which have a firm base in human nature and we need to look for them and build them into our lives.

Maybe people have lost their faith in beauty because they have lost their belief in ideals. All there is, they are tempted to think, is the world of appetite. There are no values other than utilitarian ones. Something has a value if it has a use and what’s the use of beauty?

“All art is absolutely useless”, wrote Oscar Wilde, who intended his remark as praise. For Wilde beauty was a value higher than usefulness. People need useless things just as much as and even more than they need things for their use. Just think of it. What is the use of love, a friendship, of worship? None whatsoever. And the same goes for beauty.

Our consumer society puts usefulness first and beauty is no better than a side-effect. Since art is useless it doesn’t matter what you read, what you look at, what you listen to. We are besieged by messages on every side, titillated, tempted by appetitie – never addressed. And that is one reason why beauty is disappearing from our world. “Getting and spending”, wrote Wordsworth, “we lay waste out powers.” In our culture today the advert is more important than the work of art and art works often try to capture our attention as adverts do, by being brash or outrageous, like this bejewelled platinum skull by Damien Hirst (shows “For the Love of God” [2007]). Like adverts today’s works of art aim to create a brand even if they have no product to sell, except themselves.

Beauty is assailed from two directions. By the cult of ugliness in the arts and by the cult of utility in every day life. These two cults come together in the world of modern architecture. At the turn of the 20th century architects, like artists, began to be impatient with beauty and to put utility in its place. The American architect Louis Sullivan expressed the credo of the modernists when he said that form follows function. In other words, stop thinking about the way a building looks and think instead about what it does. Sullivan’s doctrine has been used to justify the greatest crime against beauty that the world has yet seen and that is the crime of modern architecture.

I grew up near Reading which was a charming Victorian town with terraced streets and Gothic churches, crowned by elegant public buildings and smart hotels. But in the 1960s things began to change. Here in the centre the homely streets were demolished to make way for office blocks, a bus station and car parks – all designed without consideration for beauty. And the result proves, as clearly as can be, that if you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless.

(Scruton gesturing) This building is boarded up because no one has a use for it. Nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it. Nobody wants to be in it because the thing is so damned ugly.

Everywhere you turn there is ugliness and mutilation. The offices and bus station have been abandoned. The only things at home here are the pigeons fouling the pavements. Everything has been vandalised. But we shouldn’t blame the vandals. This place was built by vandals and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.

Most of our towns and cities have areas like this in which buildings erected, merely for their utility, have rapidly become useless. Not that architects learned from the disaster. When the public began to react against the brutal concrete style of the 1960s architects simply replaced it with a new kind of junk. Glass walls hung on steel frames with absurd details that don’t match. The result is another kind of failure to fit and is there simply to be demolished.

In the midst of all this desolation we find a fragment of the streets that were destroyed – once a forge, now a café. People come here from all around because it is the last bit of life remaining and the life comes from the building.

This returns me to Oscar Wilde’s remark that all art is absolutely useless. Put usefulness first and you lose it. Put beauty first and what you do will be useful forever. It turns out that nothing is more useful than the useless. We see this in traditional architecture with its decorative details. Ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful and satisfy our need for harmony. In a strange way they make us feel at home. They remind us that we have more than practical needs. We are not just governed by animal appetites, like eating and sleeping. We have spiritual and moral needs too and if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we.

We all know what it is like, even in the everyday world, suddenly to be transported by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation. A flash of sunlight, a remembered melody, the face of someone loved – these dawn on us in the most distracted moments and suddenly life is worthwhile. These are timeless moments in which we feel the presence of another and higher world.

From the beginning of Western civilisation poets and philosophers have seen the experience of beauty as calling us to the divine. Plato, writing in Athens in the fourth century BC, argued that beauty is the sign of another and higher order. “Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind”, he wrote, “you will be able to nourish true virtue and become the friend of God.”

Plato was an idealist. He believed that human beings are pilgrims and passengers in this world, while always aspiring beyond it to the eternal realm where we will be united with God. God exists in a transcendental world to which we humans aspire, but which we cannot know directly. But one way of glimpsing that heavenly sphere while here below is through the experience of beauty. This leads to a paradox. For Plato beauty was first and foremost the beauty of the human face and the human form. The love of beauty, he thought, originated in eros, a passion that all of us feel. We would call this passion romantic love. For Plato eros was a cosmic force which flows through us in the form of sexual desire.

But if human beauty arouses desire how can it have anything to do with the divine? Desire is for the individual, living in this world. It is an urgent passion. Sexual desire presents us with a choice: adoration or appetite? Love or lust? Lust is about taking, but love is about giving.

Lust brings ugliness – the ugliness of human relations in which one person treats another as a disposable instrument. To reach the source of beauty we must overcome lust.

This longing without lust is what we mean today by Platonic love. When we find beauty in a youthful person it is because we glimpse the light of eternity shining in those features from a heavenly source beyond this world. The beautiful human form is an invitation to unite with it spiritually not physically. Our feeling for beauty therefore is a religious and not a sensual emotion.

This theory of Plato’s is astonishing. Beauty, he thought, is a visitor from another world. We can do nothing with it save contemplate its pure radiance. Anything else pollutes and desecrates it, destroying its sacred aura. Plato’s theory may seem quaint to people today, but it is one of the most influential theories in history. Throughout our civilisation poets, story-tellers, painters, priests and philosophers have been inspired by Plato’s views on sex and love.

(Scruton looks at books in his library) If we to look just in the poetry corner by people who have tried to express the Platonic vision of the erotic, we have Thomas Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur; John Donne, Here and There; Gawain and the Green Knight; Chaucer, especially the Knight’s Tale; the poems of the Pearl manuscript; Cavalcanti, the master of Dante; and definitely Dante himself; Spencer, of course – Faery Queen; Daffydap Gwvyilyn – to take the Welsh version of it all; Troubadours by Christina Rosetti – and so it goes on.

The early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli illustrated this theory in this famous painting which shows the birth of Venus, goddess of erotic love (The Birth of Venus, 1482-1486). Venus looks on the world from a place beyond desire. She is inviting us to transcend our earthly appetites and unite with her through the pure love of beauty. Botticelli’s model was Simonetta Vespucci. Botticelli loved her until the end of her short life and actually asked to be buried at her feet. She represented for him Plato’s ideal. This was beauty to be contemplated, but not possessed.

Plato and Botticelli are telling us that real beauty lies beyond sexual desire. So we can find beauty not only in a desirable young person but also in a face full of age, grief and wisdom such as Rembrandt painted (Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts, 1631). The beauty of a face is a symbol of the life expressed in it. It is flesh become spirit. And in fixing our eyes on it we seem to see right through into the soul (Portrait of Aechje Claesdr, 1634). Painters like Rembrandt are important for showing us that beauty is an ordinary, everyday kind of thing. It lies all around us. We need only the eyes to see it and the hearts to feel (Portrait of Rembrandt’s Mother). The most ordinary event can be made into something beautiful by a painter who can see into the heart of things.

So long as the belief in a transcendental God was firmly anchored in the heart of our civilisation, artists and philosophers continued to think of beauty in Plato’s way. Beauty was the revelation of God in the here and now. This religious approach to the beautiful lasted for 2000 years. But in the 17th century the scientific revolution began to sow the seeds of doubt. The medieval church accepted the ancient view that the earth lies at the centre of the universe. Then Copernicus and Galileo proved that the earth circles the sun and Newton completed their work, describing a clockwork universe in which each moment follows mechanically from the one before. This was the Enlightenment vision. It described our world as though there was no place in it for gods and spirits; no place for values and ideals; no place for anything save the regular clockwork movement which turned the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun for no purpose whatsoever.

At the heart of Newton’s universe is a God-shaped hole, a spiritual vacuum and one philosopher in particular set out to fill this vacuum. That is the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Science explains things, but thought Shaftesbury, its account of the world is in one way incomplete. We can see the world from another perspective – not seeking to use it or explain it, but simply contemplating its appearance as we might contemplate a landscape or a flower. The idea that the world is intrinsically meaningful, full of an enchantment that it needs no religious doctrine to perceive, answers to a deep emotional need. Beauty was not planted in the world by God, but discovered there by people.

Shaftesbury’s idea encouraged the cultivation of beauty, which raised the appreciation of art and nature to the place once occupied by the worship of God. Beauty was to fill the God-shaped hole made by science (Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, 1505). Artists were no longer illustrators of the sacred stories who worked as servants as the church. They were discovering the stories for themselves, by interpreting the secrets of nature. Landscapes which used to be mere backgrounds for holy images became foregrounds with the human figure often lost in their folds (Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape, 1645; Landscape with Apollo and Mercury, 1660). But for Shaftesbury it does not need a work of art to present us with the beauty of the world. We simply need to look on things with clear eyes and free emotions.

Shaftesbury is telling us to stop using things, to stop explaining them and exploiting them, but look at them instead. Then we will understand what they mean. The message of the flower is the flower.

Zen Buddhists have said similar things. Only by leaving all our business and interests to one side do we really encounter the real truth of the flower. Seeing things that way we discover their beauty.

The greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, was profoundly influenced by Shaftesbury’s idea. Kant argued that the experience of beauty comes when we put our interests to one side; when we look on things not to use them for our own purposes or to explain how they work or to satisfy some need or appetite, but simply to absorb them and to endorse what they are.

Consider the joy you might feel when you hold a friend’s baby in your arms. You don’t want to do anything with the baby. You don’t want to eat it, to put it to any use or conduct scientific experiments on it. You want simply to look at it and feel the great surge of delight that comes when you focus all your thoughts on this baby and none at all on yourself. That is what Kant described as a disinterested attitude and it is the attitude that underlies our experience of beauty.

To explain this is extremely difficult because if you have never experienced it you don’t really know what it is. But everybody listening to a beautiful piece of music, looking at a sublime landscape, reading a poem that seems to contain the essence of the thing it describes – everybody in an experience like that says “Yes, this is enough!”

But why is this experience so important? The encounter with beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal that it seems hardly to belong to the ordinary world. Yet beauty shines on us from ordinary things. Is it a feature of the world or a figment of the imagination?

Most of the time our lives are organised by our everyday concerns. But every now and then we find ourselves jolted out of our complacency in the presence of something vastly more important than our immediate desires and interests, something not of this world. From Plato to Kant philosophers have tried to capture the peculiar way in which beauty dawns on us – like a sudden ray of sunlight or a surge of love. For Plato the only explanation of such an experience was its transcendental origin. It speaks to us like the voice of God. And Kant too, in a much more sober way, believed that the experience of beauty connects us with the ultimate mystery of being.

Through beauty we are brought into the presence of the sacred. We can understand what such philosophers mean if we reflect on what we feel in the presence of death, especially the death of someone loved. We look with awe on the human body from which the life has fled. We are reluctant to touch the dead body. We see it as not properly a part of our world, almost a visitor from other sphere. And the same sense of the transcendental arises in the experience that inspired Plato – the experience of falling in love.

This too is a human universal and it as experience of the strangest kind. The face and body of the beloved are imbued with the intensest life. But in one crucial respect, they are like the body of someone dead. They seem not to belong in the everyday world. Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture.

But these great changes in the stream of life – the urge to unite with another person, the loss of someone loved are moments when we understand the sacred. If we look at the history of the idea of beauty (Bernini, Ecstasy of St Teresa, 1647-52) we see that philosophers and artists have had good reason to connect the beautiful and the sacred and to see our need for beauty as something deep in our nature. Part of our longing for consolation in a world of danger, sorrow and distress (Francisco de Goya, Los Desastres de la Guerra – Plate 15 and Plate 39, 1810-11). Today many artists look on the idea of beauty with disdain (Jake and Dinos Chapman, Disasters of War, 2001) – a leftover from a vanished way of living which has no real connection with the world that now surrounds us. So there has been a desire to desecrate the experiences of sex and death by displaying them in trivial and impersonal ways (Jake and Dinos Chapman, Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, Desublimated, Libidinal Model, 1995; Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994) and to destroy all sense of their spiritual significance (Sarah Lucas, Chicken Knickers, 1997; Got a Salmon on [Prawn], 1994; Jeff Koons, Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006). Just as those who lose their religion have an urge to mock the faith they have lost (Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987) so do artists today feel an urge to treat human life in demeaning ways and to mock the pursuit of beauty (Gilbert & George, Shitty, 1994; Martin Kippenberger, Zuerst die Fusse [Feet First], 1990). This wilful desecration is also a denial of love – an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And this, it seems to me, is the most important feature of our postmodern culture; that it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.

Of course, this habit of dwelling on the distressing side of human life isn’t new. From the beginning of our civilisation it has been one of the tasks of art to take what is most painful in the human condition and to redeem it in a work of beauty (King Lear, William Shakespeare – scene showing the grieving king). Art has the ability to redeem life, by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things. Mantegna’s crucifixion displaying the cruellest and most ugly of deaths achieves a kind of majesty and serenity (Andrea Mantegna, Calvary, 1457-1460). It redeems the horror that it shows. In the face of death human beings can still show nobility, compassion and dignity. And art helps us to accept death, by presenting it in such a light.

What about things which are not tragic but merely sordid or depraved. Can art find beauty even here? This painting by Delacroix shows us the artist’s bed in all its sordid disorder (Eugene Delacroix, Un Lit Defait, 1827). He too is bringing beauty to a thing that lacks it and bestowing a kind of blessing on his own emotional chaos. Delacroix says, “See how these sweat-stained sheets record the troubled dreams, the tormented energy of the person who has left them and how the light picks them out as if they are still animated by the sleeper.” The bed is transformed by the creative act to become something else – a vivid symbol of the human condition and one which makes a bond between us and the artist.

Some people describe Tracey Emin’s bed in that way (Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998). But there is all the difference in the world between a real work of art which makes ugliness beautiful and the fake work of art which shares the ugliness that it shows. This is modern life, presented in all its randomness and disorder.

Breakfast with Frost, BBC 1999

David Frost: “What is it that makes that art rather than just a rumpled bed?” Tracey Emin: “The first thing that makes it art is that I say that it is.” Interviewer: “You say that is.. Emin: “I say that it is.” Frost: “The second thing is that the Tate says that it is….But what do you want the viewer, the visitor to the gallery to say? Do you want…. You don’t want them to say, ‘I think that’s beautiful.’” Emin: “No, no one’s actually said that, only me.” Frost: “You think it’s beautiful?” Emin: “Yeah…. I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have showed it.”

(Scruton) How can this be a beautiful work of art? It makes no attempt to transform the raw material of an idea. It is just one sordid reality among others – literally, an unmade bed.

We are back with the question raised by Duchamps’ Urinal, whether anything can be art. This question occupies both the would-be innovators and the traditionalists like Alexander Stoddart, a monumental sculptor whose works stand in public places around the world, as well as in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

Conversation with Alexander Stoddart

Scruton: “A defender of conceptual art may say an idea can be beautiful so that there is nothing wrong with conceptual art as such.” Stoddart, “Yes, but the problem… this is in everyone’s field of endeavour. The lawyer can come up with a beautiful idea, the statesman, the medic.. ‘Let’s cure cancer’ – beautiful idea. But he doesn’t say he’s an artist in the back of that. Conceptual art, of course, is entirely word-bound. It is in fact a kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description. So you just need to say ‘half a cow in a tank of formaldehyde’ and you’re really all the way there. The object itself then can really be dumped. Tracey Emin’s bed is a perfect example of that. If you walked past a skip in some scheme and you saw that bed lying there you would walk on. But, of course, if you saw even just the torso of the Apollo Belvedere lying in that skip you would be arrested by it and you may even climb in and try to retrieve it (Apollo Belvedere, Torso). Many students come to me from sculpture departments, secretly, of course, because they don’t want to tell their tutors that they’ve come to truck with the enemy and they say ‘I tried to make a model figure and then a tutor came up and told me to cut it in half and dump some diarrhoea on top of it and that will make it interesting.” Scruton: “What I feel about the standardised desecration that passes for art is that actually is a kind of immorality because it is an attempt to obliterate meaning from the human form in some way.” Stoddart: “It’s an attempt to obliterate knowledge.”

(Scruton) The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which put beauty and craft at the top of the agenda. Those like Alexander Stoddart who try to restore the age-old connection between the beautiful and the sacred are seen as old-fashioned and absurd.

The same kind of criticism is aimed at traditionalists in architecture. One target is Léon Krier, architect of the Prince of Wales model town of Poundbury. Designing modest streets, laid out in traditional ways, using the well-tried and much loved details that have served us down the centuries – Léon Krier has created a genuine settlement. The proportions are human proportions. The details are restful to the eye. This is not great or original architecture. Nor does it try to be. It is a modest attempt to get things right by following patterns and examples laid down by tradition. This is not nostalgia, but knowledge passed on from age to age. Architecture that doesn’t respect the past is not respecting the present because it is not respecting people’s primary need from architecture which is to build a long-standing home.

I have shown some of the ways in which artists and architects have followed the call of beauty. In doing so they have given our world meaning. The masters of the past recognised that we have spiritual needs as well as animal appetites. For Plato beauty was a path to God, while thinkers of the Enlightenment saw art and beauty as ways in which we save ourselves from meaningless routines and rise to a higher level. But art turned its back on beauty. It became a slave to the consumer culture feeding our pleasures and addictions and wallowing in self-disgust. That it seems to me is the lesson of the ugliest forms of art and architecture. They do not show reality but take revenge on it, spoiling what might have been a home and leaving us to wander unconsoled and alienated in a spiritual desert.

Of course, it is true that there is much in the world today that distracts and troubles us. Our lives are full of leftovers. We battle through noise and distraction and nothing resolves. The right response, however, is not to endorse this alienation. It is to look for the path back from the desert, one that will point us to a place where the real and the ideal may still exist in harmony.

In my own life I have found this path more easily through music than through any other art form. Pergolesi was 26 when he wrote the Stabat Mata. It describes the grief of the holy virgin, beside the cross of the dying Christ. All the suffering of the world is symbolised in its exquisite lines. Given that Pergolesi was suffering from tuberculosis when he wrote the Stabat Mata, he is that Son dying on the cross too. In fact he died within a few months of the work’s completion. This is not a complex or ambitious piece of music, simply a heartfelt expression of the composer’s faith. It shows the way in which deep and troubling emotions can achieve unity and freedom through music. The voice of Mary is written for two singers. The melody rises slowly, painfully, resolving dissonance only to be gripped by another dissonance as the voices clash, representing the conflict and sorrow within her.

Singer Catherine Bott: “Why don’t I just give you bar 18?” Scruton (playing piano): “Okay.” (Catherine Bott and James Bowman sing together) Catherine Bott: “Here we have a very simple and sacred text. The mother stands grieving and weeping at the cross on which her son is hanging. That’s really all that you have to say.” James Bowman: “And a completely unmusical person would immediately get the message – that it’s a piece of grieving, wouldn’t they? There can be no possible doubt about that.” Scruton: “The music takes over the words and makes them speak to you in another language in your own heart.” Catherine Bott: “Well, it means today in our secular world it can move and delight without people having to know what it’s about.” Scruton: “You learn without the theological apparatus that there is this thing called suffering and that it’s the destiny of all of us, but also it’s not the end of all of us.”

In this film I have described beauty as an essential resource. Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home. And in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence. This capacity of beauty to redeem our suffering is one reason why beauty can be seen as a substitute for religion.

Why give priority to religion? Why not say religion is a beauty substitute? Better still, why describe the two as rivals? The sacred and the beautiful stand side by side – two doors that open on to a single space and in that space we find our home.

__________

Full listing of all art works shown in Scruton’s video

www.facetofaceintercultural.com.au

Buy now

Upon clicking 'Buy now' you will be redirected to paypal.com where you can securely and quickly complete your purchase with a few clicks.



Immediately after payment at PayPal you will be redirected to a download page which provides you instant access to your purchase.