Roger Scruton – “Why Beauty Matters”
At any time between 1750 and 1930 if you had 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 twentieth 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 soulless and sterile.
And it’s 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 with it there is the danger that 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 civilization for over two thousand 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 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 a path leading out of that desert.
It is a path leading 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.
Marcel Duchamp
The pattern was set nearly a century ago by the French artist, Marcel Duchamp.
Who signed a urinalwith a fictitious signature, R. Mutt, and entered it for an exhibition (in 1917).
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, showing us that anything could be art.
1) Like a light going on and off.
2) A can of excrement.
3) Or even a pile of bricks.
No longer does art have a sacred status raising us to a higher moral or spiritual plane, it is just one human gesture among others, no more meaningful than a laugh or shout.
“I think they are making fun of us. It’s a pile of bricks!” – says a lady.
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 though by now that 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 does not justify the appropriation of the label “art.”
If a work of art is nothing more than an idea, 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.
Duchamp
Presenter; What you were also attempting to do, as I understand it, was to devalue the art as an object, simply by saying if I say it is a work of art, then it is a work of art
Duchamp: Yes, the word work of art is not so important to me. I don’t care about the word “art” because it has been so discredited.
Presenter: But you in fact contributed to the discrediting deliberately.
Duchamp: Deliberately, yes. So, I want to get rid of it the way many people today have done away with religion.
People accepted Duchamp at his own valuation.
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.