I saw this article in The City Journal:
Roger Scruton
We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.
Click the link above to see the article. I included the subtitle because it gives you a sense of where Mr Scruton is headed. It is an argument one comes across regularly in our culture, and in Christian circles it is a kind of rallying cry- let’s all get together and rescue “beauty” in the name of God..there is a cultural war going on…we must oppose those that would shove ugliness in our face for the sake of art. The usual suspects are usually rounded up, and Scruton does not disappoint:
It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody, harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos.
Of course, these forces of evil are always set aside standards of good, and never ones from our contemporary culture. Scruton again…
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture.
Or a little later in the article…
Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters—Poussin, Guardi, Turner, Corot, Cézanne—and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and fixed in images. The art of landscape painting, as it arose in the seventeenth century and endured into our time, is devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things.
I have to say Cezanne is an interesting choice. I would agree that his works are beautiful, but I seriously doubt he would approve of having his work characterized as “moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things.”
The basic problems I have with this kind of argument are twofold. First, I question the definition and understanding of the word beauty, and second, I question the idea that it is not to be found in contemporary art, and subsequently that it needs to be “saved.”
For the first question, I think the understanding of beauty, or what we see as an attempt to create beauty in the past, is quite suspect, and not at all what we mean now. Art aesthetics, schools and academies from the Renaissance on have really seen beauty as an ideal that cannot be found in this world, and therefore has to be invented, or perhaps the better word is projected, onto our natural world. One did not, for example, try to draw the model, or the landscape as it was, but how it would be if it were ideal. The is an artist who does this now. His name is Thomas Kincaide.
Do you really want to argue that Kincaide’s work what contemporary art should be?
That’s to talk about beauty in landscape works. In terms of the human figure we also have the contemporary version of the kind of beauty the academies aspired to. It’s the world of fashion models, where far too skinny young women are squeezed into tiny bikinis and photographed, only to have that picture airbrushed to make them impossibly curvy. In Renaissance terms that would be something like Titian’s Venus of Urbino- or in Baroque terms Boucher’s “Diana Leaving the Bath” (well, most anything by Boucher makes the cut). Again, I have to say, when you are talking about beauty and the ideal, at least historically, you have to think about these types of works, which are quite problematic in many ways (sexually, for one obvious way). When we talk about beauty, we do not always mean it in these same terms. We usually talk about it in the terms Scruton himself uses: that is to say something transcendent (sacred), but also something ordinary, or everyday.
This is not at all the way beauty manifests itself in the canon of Western art history (at least not until, say Realism, at the turn of the last century). Not to say it is not there at all, but it is not there in the ubiquitous way modern thinkers typically suggest. It is worth noting that those that have approached beauty in the ordinary are people like Caravaggio and Courbet, both of which were considered scandalous and shocking in their time because their work was course and ugly–the exact same complaint voiced of critics like Scruton (to be fair I do not know what Scruton would say about either of these artists, although I would like to think he would affirm Caravaggio if not Courbet). It is not that far of a stretch to say that most artist derided as wallowing in ugliness and shock today would align themselves with artists like Caravaggio and Courbet- artists who were suspicious of beauty because, rather than see it as an ideal, they saw it as an obstruction to another ideal (say, “truth,” or “justice,” for lack of better words).
When confronted with the ugliness, or the shock, of a contemporary artwork, I think it is helpful to start with the question “Why, to what end?” Am I saying that all work of contemporary art is life affirming? No. But I am saying a work of art is not inherently bad because it is either shocking or “ugly,” and that these same shocking/ugly works often have an underlying message that is life affirming. Furthermore they may be appropriately shocking/ugly.
As for the second point, I would have to say that Scruton takes the common tactic of pointing to the most extreme examples and holding them up as the norm. I certainly find lots of work in the contemporary art world, work that is highly regarded, which is very beautiful. I am not familiar with Bieito’s production of Die Entführung, and I have to agree that–at least by Scruton’s description–it is hard to see it as having any kind of life affirming qualities, except perhaps in a very base and distorted sense. And I am not an opera goer by nature, so I cannot really comment on what is happening in the opera world. But I can offer antidotes to the other “hell-in-a-handbasket” works Scruton uses as examples. You can too, I bet. For every Tarantino film out there that is about gratuitous violence, there are several films that I think are “beautiful” and life affirming. Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, and Pieces of April come to mind immediately. All of these are movies, by the way, that are both beautiful and ugly, shocking and life affirming. For every Serrano’s Piss Christ (a work, by the way, that is visually quite hauntingly beautiful, by any standard–and one that I think is worthy of deeper consideration than I can give here), there are beautiful works by Janine Antoni, Vija Celmins, Mel Chin, Do Ho Suh, Pepon Osorio, Martin Puryear and James Turrell, just to name a few (I deliberately picked artists you can easily find at the PBS website for their series Art 21 so you can judge for yourselves). These artist may challenge our perceptions of beauty, but they reveal to us something fully ordinary, profound, life-affirming, and perhaps even sacred.
–which is exactly the kind of thing it seems Scruton–and others who wail and gnash their teeth at the state of the arts–is looking for.
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