The inscrutonable Roger on the modern intoxication with ugliness.
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer…
The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.
One Comment
Just seeing this quote makes me feel reassured. Truth and beauty used to be equated… now truth is in the eye of the beholder, and can make no claims of certainty or beauty. Artists are more interested in tearing down ‘the establishment’, or representing the ugliness of their interior life, if anything. A possible exception to this, for me, might be some of the works of Damien Hirst. Perhaps the ongoing public discussion of the sexual – indeed, the wholesale commercialisation of the sexual – is somewhat linked with the absence of beauty, as examined in the cultural conversation? Just a thought.