Well worth watching this entire documentary. It’s “Why Beauty Matters” featuring Roger Scruton. BBC2 broadcasted it in 2009.
His perspective, passed down from Plato, is that beauty is a divine revaluation from the higher realm. This also contains a discussion of the horror of modern architecture, and how it compares with more traditional forms. Those things that are beautiful attract people, and ugly things repel them, and attract vandals. In the same way, ugly people attract degradation to themselves, and the beautiful draw respect and care to themselves.
Modern art is a ‘cult of ugliness,’ and it has in part encouraged bad manners, alienation, and self-absorption. As buildings and objects have been reduced to their utility-function, people come to see one another as items to be used.
The speaker makes a persuasive case that what you read and listen to matters; that aesthetics has profound impacts on everything else in society.
In Scruton’s view, beauty is a remedy for the chaos and suffering which is our fate to endure as mortals. Progressives prefer to pop a Paxil™ and to surround themselves in ugliness.
As an aside, venerating modern art is a crucial test for all high status progressives. One of the reasons why advertising has supplanted ‘high’ art is because, despite its degraded and fantasy-exciting nature, it still tends to hew to basic aesthetic standards and employs competent creative craftsmen. When a successful business person wants to solidify his status within the progressive system of politics, aesthetics, and belief, he buys modern art for either himself or for his company, often at great expense.
Sacrificing $86 million for a meaningless Rothko canvas is an un-fakeable way that you believe in the anti-sacred values of the progressive world view. It shows that you believe in raising ugliness up high, denigrating beauty.
For a good alternative denunciation of most modern art and what to do about it, I recommend Jonathan Bowden’s speech “Against the Turner Prize,” which is on Youtube. I consider his reasoning to be much sharper, and his concerns to be much more relatable.
Irony abounds. Up until a hundred or so years ago, most people lived difficult lives with the specter of famine, death and disease never far away. People dumped their waste water into the streets, which animals roamed and fouled. Life was uglier and stinkier. And yet the elites of the time did what they could to increase beauty, for themselves and others.
Today, we live lives of abundance and soft luxury. We don’t worry about where our next bite to eat will come from, nor do we fear the next outbreak of plague. The streets are a lot less stinkier. We have the wealth and opportunity to fill our lives with beauty. And yet our elites decide to force ugliness upon us.
Actually, some of the early modern architecture was quite beautiful in a spare, sci-fi sort of way, which is why it’s “out” today. “Post-Modernism” soon solved THAT problem…
Like FL Wright?
Yes, Wright would be a good example, as would Eero Sarrinen and John Lautner. And even some of the Bauhaus buildings, while bland, were not actively, intentionally ugly like Frank Gehry’s stuff. I mean, the Seagram’s Building is not beautiful, but it was not created to deliberately offend, by men who hated their own civilization. The Modernist’s slogan was “Make it New”. Not necessarily an admirable goal from the standpoint of a reactionary, but it’s still a lot better than the Post-Modernist “Make it Ugly” school