On Art, Beauty, and Culture

I’ve recently finished reading Roger Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative, which I found to be very well written, engaging, informative, and thought-provoking. It deals with the politics, economics, and socially practical concerns of life in the world, but it offers many points analogous and applicable to the life of the Church on earth, as well. Though I don’t agree with Scruton on every point and position, his reasoning and conclusions are consistently compelling, and I really resonate with the way he thinks. And I was especially struck by his discussion of art, beauty, and culture in the second-last chapter of the book, “Realms of Value.” His observations and assessment are not only instructive with respect to the immediate topics at hand, though they are beneficial and worthwhile in that way, to be sure; but they are also applicable and beneficial to the consideration of aesthetics in the art and architecture of the Church and in the conduct and adornment of her ceremonies. It is truly meet, right, and salutary that the Church’s culture should be one of real beauty; and it bears defending that real beauty actually can be recognized and valued as a genuine gift and grace of God.

With that in mind, here are some excerpts from Roger Scruton dealing with art, beauty, and culture, which do, I believe, have something to say and something to teach us about the way we think about the Church’s worship of the Lord in the giving and receiving of His Liturgy of the Gospel:

"A century ago, Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal, entitled it ‘La Fontaine,’ and then exhibited it as a work of art. This famous gesture has since been repeated ad nauseam, and in so far as students now learn anything in art schools, it consists of the ability to perform this gesture while believing it to be original — an epistemological achievement comparable to that of the White Queen who, in her youth, could believe six impossible propositions before breakfast. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’ The literature of this industry has left a residue of scepticism that has fueled the attack on culture. If anything can count as art, then art ceases to have a point. All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people like looking at some things, others like looking at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand as depending on a conception of the artwork that was washed down the drain of Duchamp’s ‘fountain.’ The argument has been rehearsed with malicious wit by John Carey, and is fast becoming orthodoxy, not least because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that reality TV is ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and techno-rock the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. However, the argument is based on the elementary mistake of thinking of art as what Mill called a ‘natural kind,’ like water, calcium carbonate or the tiger — in other words, a kind whose essence is fixed not by human interests, but by the way things are. If, in defining art, we were attempting to isolate some feature of the natural order, then our definition would certainly have failed if we could set no limits to the concept. ‘Art,’ however, is not the name of a natural kind, but of a functional kind. The word ‘art’ works like the word ‘table.’ Anything is a table if it can be used as tables are used — to support things at which we sit to work or eat. A packing case can be a table; an old urinal can be a table; a human slave can be a table. This does not make the concept arbitrary; nor does it prevent us from distinguishing good tables from bad. . . .

"Anything is art if somebody sincerely says so. For art is a functional kind. A work of art is something put forward as an object of aesthetic interest. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is aesthetically empty. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is brash, vulgar, obscene or whatever. But none of this implies that the category of art is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good and bad art. Still less does it suggest that there is no place for the criticism of art, or for the kind of aesthetic education that has a humane aesthetic understanding as its goal. . . .

"In defining art as a functional kind I have introduced a new idea — that of ‘aesthetic interest.’ We are all familiar with this kind of interest, though we don’t necessarily know how to define it. And we know that, like amusement, aesthetic interest is inseparable from judgement — hence the tradition of artistic and literary criticism which is one of the most striking achievements of our culture. Works of art, like jokes, are objects of perception: it is how they look, how they sound, how they appeal to our sensory perception that matters. In aesthetic interest we see the world as it really seems: in Wallace Stevens’s words, we ‘Let be be finale of seem.’ We then encounter a unity of experience and thought, a coming together of the sensory and the intellectual for which ‘imagination’ is the everyday name. This fact, which places the meaning of aesthetic experience outside the reach of science, explains its peculiar value. In the moment of beauty we encounter meaning in immediate and sensory form: we are endorsed and justified in being here, now and alive. Aesthetic interest is an interest in appearances. But there are appearances that we ought to avoid, however much they fascinate us. By contrast, there are appearances which are not merely permissible objects of aesthetic interest, but which reward that interest with knowledge, understanding and emotional uplift. . . .

"A culture does not comprise works of art only, nor is it directed solely to aesthetic interests. It is the sphere of intrinsically interesting artefacts, linked by the faculty of judgement to our aspirations and ideals. We appreciate jokes, works of art, arguments, works of history and literature, manners, dress, rituals and forms of behavior. And all these things are shaped through judgement. A culture consists of all those activities and artefacts that are organized by the ‘common pursuit of true judgement,’ as T. S. Eliot once put it. True judgement involves the search for meaning through the reflective encounter with things made, composed and written with such an end in view. Some of those things will be works of art, addressed to the aesthetic interest; others will be discursive works of history or philosophy, addressed to the interest in ideas. Both kinds of work explore the meaning of the world and the life of society. And the purpose of both is to stimulate the judgements through which we understand each other and ourselves. Artistic and philosophical traditions therefore provide our paradigm of culture. And the principle that organizes a tradition also discriminates within it, creating the canon of masterpieces, the received monuments, the ‘touchstones’ as Matthew Arnold once called them, which it is the goal of humane education to appreciate and to understand. Hence the conservative defense of realms of value will focus on the curriculum, and on keeping present in the minds of the young those great works that created the emotional world in which they live, whether or not they are yet aware of it. Fundamental to that enterprise is the love of beauty. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual conceptions acquire sensuous form. And no romantic painter, musician or writer would have denied that beauty was the true subject matter of art. But at some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert or transgress moral certainties and it was not beauty but originality — however achieved and at whatever moral cost — that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty, as next in line to kitsch — something too sweet and inoffensive to be pursued by the serious modern artist. . . .

"So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was increasingly pushed to the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality that previously signified aesthetic failure became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty was regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge orthodoxy and to break free from conventional constraints. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting Arthur Danto in his Paul Carus lectures to argue that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status, and another social role. Indeed, it might seem that, wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to pre-empt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art which rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature — such as the crucifix pickled in urine, by Antonio Serra. 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 repertoire. Hence the invasion of pop music by words and rhythms that speak of unremitting violence, often rejecting 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, devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos. Those phenomena record a habit of desecration, in which life is not so much celebrated by art as targeted by it. Artists are now able to make their reputation by constructing an original frame, in which to put the human face on display and throw trash at it. What do we make of this, and how do we find the way back to the thing that so many people long for, which is the vision of beauty? Maybe it sounds a little sentimental to speak in that way of a ‘vision of beauty.’ But what I mean is not some saccharine, Christmas-card image of human life, but rather the elementary ways in which ideals and decencies enter our ordinary world and make themselves known, as love and charity make themselves known in Mozart’s music. There is a great hunger for beauty in our world, and it is a hunger that popular art often fails to recognize and much serious art defies. It is only because there are artists, writers and composers who have, through the last half-century of negativity, devoted their labors to keeping beauty alive that we can hope to emerge, one day, from the tedious culture of transgression. . . .

"Whatever their politics, those artists are the true conservatives of our time, since they have recognized that there can be no artistic truth without the tradition that makes it possible, and have devoted their creative lives to maintaining, adapting and transforming that tradition, so that it does not die" (Roger Scruton, selected excerpts from “Realms of Value,” Chapter 11 in How to Be a Conservative, April 2019).