Beauty and Desecration - Roger Scruton - Power of Beauty Conference

just to say a few general philosophical things to begin with about she matters we live in a world in which utilitarian values are not just triumphant but for many people the only values that there are that there seems to be no no sense that things can have a value which is not a form of use and this means that all of us are engaged all the time in what some philosophers call instrumental reasoning whenever we're asked to justify something we try and find a purpose for it we say that you know justify for instance the shape of this room you know you're justified in terms of its purpose which is to gather people together to listen to a lecture and if it's not very efficient at that then the room has not actually achieved what it set out to achieve and in all our activities we were familiar with with this kind of reasoning but the question is yeah what other kinds of reasoning are there or is that the only kind well you are we know perfectly well that it can't be the only kind because if things if something as a means to an end there has to be an end that it's a means to and that too needs a justification so we do reason with each other probably rather insecurely but nevertheless we do reason about the ends of our activity what our goals are and whether we should be pursuing the goals that we pursue and this is especially true in these activities like building building a room like this or setting out on a career and so on in which there is a long term project involved and an end point that you can't very clearly envisage you know the one you set out to build something you can't clearly envisage the endpoint just buy from it from a ground plan or whatever you need some conception of not just how it will look like but what it would be like to live with it and only if you know what it's like to live with will you be justified in building it there is a simple example of an activity in which aesthetic reasoning is fundamental one reason why modern architecture is such a failure is that people don't do this they don't try and envisage what it's like to live with the product of their building only what it what its capacity is for the number of people assigned to it and so on and so what reasoning about what it's like to live with something means bringing the end of your activity forward into the present so that you sense its being as it were with you in the moment where you are and that is one of the one of the roles of beauty in our life and an aesthetic judgment to do that now in another area of course we we argue about about our ends from a religious point of view with we know that you know that people have this conception of the of the meaning of life as lying in some way beyond life either in the transcendental or in the afterlife or whatever and that this meaning is sometimes revealed in the present moment moments which people are apt to describe as sacred the moment of liturgy and worship at the moment of Revelation reading a sacred text and so on and perhaps being blessed with that experience with the prayer-book and Paul described as the peace that passeth understanding well that's a very powerful emotion and powerful experience if you can obtain it but of course we live in a world where not everybody does obtain it or even seek for it and increasingly the surrounding culture either ignores that sort of thing or denigrates it so it's very difficult to explain to people who are immersed in the secular culture today exactly how you would think about justifying the ends of existence and not just the means we need some other some other notion of the real presence the real presence in our life of the meaning of things if we are able to if we're going to be able to justify to others who are skeptical exactly what it is that we want them to do and I think this is our situation today here is a picture a landscape by Renoir there's no particular reason for me to have chosen this landscape and all landscapes are presented on PowerPoint are hopeless anyway because I don't know how big that is up there but anyway as you as you know it's backlit and and it doesn't contain the texture of the paint and certainly not that as the canvas still you see in that a particular artists attempt not just to present a little bit of of Ladue surf house which everybody loves but also to make you love it too and so you know whatever whatever goes on in that landscape it's imbued with a sense of peace and order and takes from the surrounding colors the vitality that makes life meaningful but Renoir like other Impressionists painted a world to which we belong and belonging is that all important aspect of human experience not everybody has it and of course our jails are full of the people who don't but most people in this room I imagine got here without criminal offenses and feel that they do instinctively belong in the world and are in the business of trying to make that belonging more rooted more more permanent and more whelmed together with their coexistence with their fellows and that of course is part of what education is about and that's what you see of course in that beautiful landscape by Renoir I paint a painting of ordinary trees and fruit trees and ordinary an ordinary mountain in the distance and so on but painting it all as part of a world to which we belong and for him for Renoir and for his contemporaries it is a post religious world but they were very much people of their time who were skeptical about religion and in any case regarded it as their duty as painters to show that it is this world not the next that matters is quite hard to pep to paint the next world as you can imagine it has been done in words by by Dante and a few painters have tried to follow him but for the most part it has been a failure but nevertheless our world is not that bad it is imbued with its own tranquility and that tranquility can reside in the perception itself that's what when I was telling us he said look you saying stop stand still look and in that perception you will see that this thing in front of you has a meaning all of its own a meaning which justifies you being in it and reminds you that you belong to it so there's a moment of love standing still that we all can achieve and of letting the the other nurse of the world dawn on us its sense of being something other than me not just imagined by me but there in front of me and including me nevertheless when painters do this the paint painters of modern life as Baudelaire called them they don't behave as photographers behave and this is something which is very difficult to explain to people these days because everybody goes around with this criminal object in their pockets immortalizing the ephemera of their existence and as a result desecrating it with their own trivial perceptions no I wasn't doing anything like that at all he wasn't pointing a camera this landscape may be the landscape didn't entirely look like that he was trying to extract from it what it means and what it means not just from the perceptual point of view but also spiritually now we have ever lived in a time where as we know there is much ugliness around us a much desecration in many ways a deliberate making ugly of things or a carelessness as to whether things should be ugly or beautiful and many things that we regard as beautiful we discover to be desecrated not just by the way we treat them but but also by the works of art which are supposed to celebrate them and we know this obviously from our experience of the human form the human form is all important to us because it's the primary locus of meaning it's the thing that means most to us in the world the human face and the human body come before us imbued with the life of the Spirit but we can also as we know desecrate them as they are desecrated by pornography and such things which turn to put the in attack away it turns the subject into an object and being turned into an object is essentially to lose one's spiritual value now part of what lies behind this is I think a growing obsession with power power is the great commodity that is as it were transferred from person to person in the world that we're creating and many people would say look here is old Scruton up in front of an audience enjoying his power you are transferring to me that power the power to hold your attention and to infect you with my reactionary attitudes and this this power is something which I have not yet justified to you and many people are many scholars influenced by people like Foucault will say that I couldn't justify it the institution is structured by domination and I'm enjoying that domination and triumphing over you the victims who are sitting before me now you don't actually believe that because you know that you're sitting there willingly but nevertheless you can read ascribe the whole of the world in that way you could take the most innocent thing you know the love of a mother for a child or a child for the mother you know there's power in that too if they weren't the mother couldn't protect the child and yet that's it's not the power aspect of it that is important it's the love aspect but all all our loves create powers and that in all the things that matter to us most there is that element of power the tranquility that term that Renoir is trying to put across to us in that painting you know the many of the literary and artistic critics today would ask the question what does this tranquility conceal who is using it who is gaining who is losing and you can imagine the text in modern language review which will analyze that painting and persuade you or try to persuade you that it is there as part of the of the hegemony of the bourgeois class representing nature as a place for that endorses it's comfortable and relaxing attitudes excluding the truth about that about labor which went into creating those fruit trees in the first place in other words legitimizing the power of the of the French bourgeoisie over the French proletariat you know and in that way but Renoir becomes part of the ideology which is being imposed upon us by our Western culture and we need to liberate the the oppressed the victim from beneath this ideology and the victim of course will turn out to be whoever the current obsession is probably working class women in this particular case so you know when you start thinking like that nothing seems to be as it seems everything that is as though there's a reality behind everything and that reality is the power that people exercise over each other and that's why beauty is a kind of deception because it's always concealing those real relations between people within which one class or one person or one group has dominion over another but of course for the impressionist painters that's all the nonsense for them seeming is everything that what one eye was trying to do in that painting is to remind you of something which you would otherwise not notice namely that the world does seem in a certain way to you and that's what it really really is the in other words how it comes across to you in your immediate perception when you stop all the instrumental reasoning forget all the powers and the Ender projects and just look and but because of this obsession with power people do wipe away the face of the world so that the way things seem is no longer available to us and that means that beauty is no longer available to us either here's an example of some of the a work of art if you can call it that which is created by two brothers it's quite normal now in the products of the British art schools for people to do joint works of art like this you know because that way you get a get rid of the romantic idea of the artistic genius who's got something special to say you know you've got you're doing it together with someone else and of course the purpose in this case is to whatever the purpose is I mean the purpose is to make the human body repulsive into a kind of liquid standing and in in these childish Mary Jane shoes and with all the parts deformed penis instead of nose and things like that you know what its point is is of course can only be understood if you realize that that these boys were brought up in a an art school which hell tells them that the purpose of art is not to beautify life not in no way to replace the sacred moments that religion might have given us in no way to give you a sense of the meaningfulness of things but on the country to deconstruct those things to show that life is essentially meaningless and you can the best do this by taking the human body and making it repulsive and of course we all know of Tracy Emmons famous bed last changed hands at 2 million pounds in which she presented were her bed after she had got out of it of course and with all the debris of her her night's dissipation lying on the carpet around it and there it is and it's in Tate Modern gallery now it's permanent resting place although of course those feats are going to rot away quicker than most sheets do I want to just contrast it with with another bed which I I mentioned this in the film that I made about this this is Delacroix's bed don't acquire as you know is a great French painter from the Romantic period who was also a highly learned and interested cultural figure perhaps one of the you know one of the greatest of nineteenth-century cultural figures in France let's say he here is his bed this isn't an actual bed of course this is a painting of a bed and in painting it he has tried to who were transfer into the bed some of his sense of the value of lying in it and being the thing that was in it and also what it meant to wrestle with the sheets in that way and if you comparison a comparison of these two does help you I think to understand a little bit about what's gone wrong with with the arch de Tracy Emmons bed it presents itself but obviously nothing beyond itself it just is there Delacroix's bed present something other than itself it's it's a life that's been translated into those fabrics a perpetuation in another form of a spiritual wrestling which we know from Delacroix's life and his other paintings that wrestling with fabric and with it with the reality the flexibility of this world and the attempt so impose upon it a meaningful human form if you like a a testimony to the spiritual life with which we invest all the objects that were in touch with or Easter which he did so he was looking for a kind of harmony order even a kind of redemption in the shape of those those sheets as he's searching for the trace left in them by the spirit which will be a meaning beyond the present moment so here we're talking about her difference between the attempt to represent life which which is also a Transfiguration of life and thing into a permanent record of the spirit and the mere debris of a life and I think this is something that once you see it you realize that that the only the first of those is a genuine artistic activity however we've entered this period in our history where where ugliness has become a kind of cult but not ugliness as such but more transgressive ugliness like those melted together human figures of the chapman brothers it's an ugliness that pollutes alma negates some familiar ideal or value now a transgression is something which also has a certain appeal you know especially to obviously to younger people it's a an act of self affirmation that frees itself from judgment it says you know the transgressive gesture is one that says I don't actually care whether you judge me or not I'm going to do it and I'm going to affirm myself against your judgment and that is in itself a liberation so people and I think we've seen this in every sphere of human endeavor since the 1960s the the assumption of a freedom to offend a freedom to annihilate other people's vision of what matters and to show that the values by which other people live don't count for you and that's something I staged which obviously all of us have to go through at certain points in our lives we have to fight against our parents fight against institutions fight against the people who seem to be preventing us from being what we truly are and going out into the world and claiming it as our own and in the normal run of things that's not a particularly bad thing to do because after all once you out there in the in the big world feeling the winds of change around you you realize that you are actually on your own and it was a terrible mistake to be so offensive to the people people you need and and gradually you work your way back to them you reassume possession of them and they of you and you're reconciled and forgiven that as in the famous parable of the prodigal son so there's a paradox in this position of of assuming a freedom to offend it's only because other people's values count for you that you can be exhilarated by defying them or disavowing their ideals and so on and but nevertheless this is certainly what artists as a certain stage did de Kooning was like I guess a paradigm of this he's an artist who I think has largely been seen through now but in a Sept in America and and the reason why he has not been seen through in America is a lot of money has been spent on his pictures so that museums art critics and private owners conspire together to make sure that they're not going to lose that two million dollars that they spend on this if you can keep the values up your museum is still worth what what the what you've invested in it but this is this is just called woman and it's his representation of the of what a woman fundamentally is you know all those ideals of womanhood which you might have entertained in your self-deceiving moments are of not as nothing compared with this representation here is another instance of this kind of way of approaching our ideals rusalka some of you may know this great opera by von Schaack which tells the the famous story of Ondine the the water nymph ruse alcoran in check who who falls in love with a with a immortal and it's a beautiful romantic story but not only about the mystery of woman but also about the importance of chastity and purity in create in preparing a woman for love and the danger in which she is put by that and of course this is symbolized by the fact that there she is living in the water if she comes out of it you know is that the end of her and if she tempts the mortal into the water is at the end of him etc and this story had been told many many times but never as well as by Dvorak and this is the production that Covent Garden London's offered made of the that are Purim which rusalka the water nymph the pure water nymph who dreams of a of an erotic relation which no water nymph is allowed turns into is turned into a prostitute and the water is in the bath in which she is lying expecting the stream of lovers of which to whom reasons that can't be explained she sings an aria to the to the moon so now that that's a very ordinary occurrence in opera productions today that's simply one example the idea in so many opera producers mind when you have a romantic fairy tale like that is of course to desecrate it as if you can and also bring in sex violence all the usual stuff in order that that audience that you've got trapped there or audience of ordinary decent middle-class people who spend a couple of hundred dollars for the ticket you know that you can really give them a hard you're never going to get them there in any other way because they came for this beautiful romantic legend and they won't come again but you've got them anyway for a couple of hours so and this is the way in which our productions tend to go now right so why did they all this come about and I think we can't understand it this this great movement to desecrate works of art like that if we don't attend a little bit to the phenomenon of kitsch and the distrust of beauty that arose because of kitsch and now in the Romantic movement which arose in that as you know in the end of the 18th century and dominated all of art through the 19th century the in the Romantic movement there was a kind of movement away from beauty anyway that that the home the homely sort of beauties that appeal to to ordinary people which don't seem to threaten them and so on there was a movement towards the sublime presenting great tragedies rather than than sweet fairy tales emphasizing the difficulties of human life the difficulty of emerging from a life of oppression and so on and we have many great works of romantic art which focus on on these fairly negative aspects of the human condition but trying to find beauty in them nevertheless all this epitomized in Baudelaires famous poem to Beauty which I recommend you to read in the Fleur du mal right so that there was a movement away from the beautiful and at the same time a fear of the sweetness of Beauty can bring into our lives isn't our kind of deception involved in that if life really is as as bad as we all know it to be isn't art deceiving us by trying to make us accept it and for unfair sweetness and consolation in it maybe there is no sweetness and consolation maybe art should have another role that of showing the truth to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to and to perceive it and that if art concentrates on beauty isn't it just going to degenerate into a form of lying or form of faking things and I'll give you a contrast here between two Venus's well everybody knows Botticelli's Venus who so detached from the world and I contrast him with Venus by Brujo Brujo being a famous salon painter of the of the 19th century in France who was a wonderfully accomplished painter in the style of anger but a quite a question mark inevitably is placed over him because of this sweetness and and gentleness and also that the perfection of everything he did which seemed to many people to be a kind of lying and Baudelaire expressed he defended many against Bouguereau because many was telling us showing us life as it is without any of this cloying sweetness so now you all know and Botticelli's Venus not an easy way to show it but in that face you see a particular conception of what the erotic is Botticelli was a platanus who believed as Plato did that beauty is an object of desire but it's also a gateway to the transcendental that that you you understand what beauty really is if you follow through that gateway leave behind your earthly desires and unite with the spiritual condition from they originally spring and this face for him was not an object of sexual desire but an object of a sexual desire that had been transcended she was Simonetta Vespucci who is mistress of his of his Prince Lorenzo de Medici and therefore unobtainable anyway but if the thought is in this Venus is the symbol of the erotic as Plato conceived it something to be transcended into the spiritual boreholes Birth of Venus as you see it's all perfection of form everything but it doesn't mean anything that you know that there she is sniffing her freshly shaven armpit wet waiting waiting for the lover who's going to come through the bathroom door and obviously should have to get rid of the company meanwhile but it is so you know so perfectly he was a great master of color and form and everything but somehow the sentiment is is fake it isn't a real Venus this is this is sexuality in its ordinary vulgar form without any of that attempt to show the meaning of it and its reflection in the transcendental this is a something just so you realize that desecration takes many forms but if we worry about Kitsch which which all painters and all artists today do what what do we do about it there's two ways of dealing with it roughly first is to try and find a way of producing real art that's not Kitsch and that's that really hard thing to do something that producing art that doesn't have this fake character isn't just a childish and a and Christmas like you know it isn't a Christmas decoration or you can do what Jeff Koons does which is produce something which is so obviously Kitsch that nobody could ever accuse you of it and saying you know of course I'm you know he's saying cause that is this is case where it's such obvious catch that it that I must be making another and deeper point by putting it there nobody's ever discovered what that deeper point is but there it is a desecrating a beautiful classical facade and you know probably for many years to come right so the causes of all this go this situation which we find ourselves go go deep we we have acquired this distrust of beauty or many people have many artists have acquired the distrust of beauty because it is an invitation into realms that have been mined you know that there are traps here you might fall into the trap of Boogaloo however beautiful your human figures they turn out in the end just to be standard Christmas card porn but or something like that that the the reality slips away from you and and you're left with just with this this fake so people artists have come to distrust beauty and I think your you all know this from modern cinema and much modern music as well that there is an attempt often to show that you're a genuine artist by producing something that nobody could possibly like because then then you must you must be serious and there are consolations also of ugliness as we see in the consolations of showing that that in some way life doesn't matter anyway that's what that's the meaning of chat that Chapman brothers sculpture life is simply a nothingness we happen to have been born but we will die and and decay and disappear and so what and there's a charm in that kind of view a charm which I I call a charm of disenchantment that being disenchanted with things gives you a kind of glamour you know if you go around a room of people who are who are going oh and are in with this kind of fake enchantment about kitsch then you're being disenchanted gives you a kind of distinction and I think many artists as it were aspire to that distinction of not being taken in by anything so to speak and not not being dupes to the surrounding culture and the surrounding values and this this added to this there is a desire perhaps to desecrate those those values as well like putting graffiti on things or a mustache on the Mona Lisa etc and I think when when that mustache was first put on the Mona Lisa about Marcel Duchamp you know you could see what he was doing he was saying he SES yes but I've we've gone beyond that as well nonsense you might be taken in by that but I'm not but essentially since ever since that gesture which was made a hundred years ago the majority of art that we've come across at least from the art schools has been a matter of putting another mustache on the Mona Lisa and of course the question automatically arises as to whether whether it's any point in doing it twice let alone a thousand times so but the the thought behind all this is that we've asked too much of art we've asked it to to be a religion substitute to be the light from and the window onto the transcendental and if it disappoints us in that then we beget we start becoming in certain way angry with it disappointment turns to repudiation puts so what is the mission of art then is there a mission that we can still maintain now I believe that we all do have a need for redemption I don't mean that necessarily in the religious sense I mean that we need our actions our gestures our plans and projects to have a fulfillment of some kind to lift us out of the day to day appetites that otherwise swallow us and all our actions aim towards us they aim beyond themselves to a point of rest in which we can look back and endorse what we have done and this is so obviously the case with human relations especially love relations but it's there in all our lives and a life without this and without ideals gets tired of itself and people when people set out on the path of transgression is partly because they've become disappointed with the possibility of actually achieving this sort of redemption but where then what where then does beauty fit into it into this and what can it actually do by way of satisfying this desire I have argued and I would just want to sketch the argument again that the search for beauty is the search for home for a place where you can be at home with yourself and with others but in particular where you belong you know it's going back to that to run while painting of which is a painting of a landscape as a thing that we belong to being at home means being at home with yourself and that means seeing yourself in some way as another as another person seeing yourself from outside not just this selfish self-involved thing that you familiar with when you wake up in the morning but that other thing that you were when you went to bed you know and had been spent a day with other people and you want to be at home with what you find and I think this search for being at home does not start with high art nor does it end there one of the reasons why people have become so confused about beauty is because they have constantly taken their examples from the realm of high art there's those great and difficult things like Botticelli's Venus you know which which you have to think about for an awful long time before you know what it really means you know high art challenges us in the deepest parts of our being and maybe we get turned off but we think we feel we can't live up to it so let's let's live in another way but that's not where the search for beauty begins nor is it where it ends I think it begins and in the end ends with in everyday life and people misconceive aesthetics when they see it merely as the realm of beauty as though that's all we were ever thinking about when we go around the world you know going around our world making aesthetic judgments it's all yes that's beautiful no that's ugly etc that's not the way we behave at all we actually make completely different kinds of judgments we talk about you know whether something fits in whether it's graceful whether that would be the right way to go forward is this cut does this color you know fit with that color and so on and I think people take revenge on beauty because they don't see that there's something more important without which there can be no revenge and that more important thing is just the instinct to get things right to make things fit in and harmonize and this is where this aesthetic judgment is a fundamental part of our everyday lives we're making it all the time now I'm not a natty dresser but even I had the question whether this tie goes with that jacket probably doesn't but nevertheless it occupied me for a certain amount time and it was part of my attempt to fit in and harmonize and also to fit in to the this occasion this occasion when I'm giving you a public lecture and so on you could put this however much more pretentious philosophical way by saying that when we do this we're trying to realize ourselves as subjects in the realm of objects that's the language that Hegel and his followers would use it's it's okay it's a slightly tough language but you see what it what it means that we are free beings we are subjects who have own inner life but that inner life is not meaningful to us if we cannot in some way make it into an outward reality among among other outward realities and we're always and all our gestures we're trying to achieve that to become something real and part of things to belong in other words so this realization is something goes on all the time and all rational beings are engaged in it and children know about this already in these two little girls you see what we concern would call the natural expression of aesthetic judgment there they are trying to fit things in the right place on the table they're not saying to themselves is this beautiful is this ugly or a sublime whatever those those words are not part of their vocabulary probably but they are asking themselves the question is this right I'm not getting it right or should it be a little bit more to the left etc and you can see in the intent in expression here something that only human beings manifest their animals manifest this sense of the rightness and wrongness of things because they're not reasoning instrumentally they've got completely beyond the whole idea of the function of these things that they're trying to fit things together so they look right and so that the guests will find that they look right - and that's the beginnings of the ascetic attitude but so we know this as well we know first of all that our world we don't accept it simply as a as a thing out there an assembly of objects we try and adorn it and fit it to ourselves and us to it and we'll we're always aware of the distinction between things standing out and fitting in sometimes it's right for them to stand out sometimes it's wrong and fitting in is one of the most important aspects of our life in every sphere of human endeavor we all have this need to be part of something greater than ourselves and this is something that happens to us all day long that that we know that we're part of something greater and we know that we are either fitting in or not fitting in and those obviously as a distinction between looking right and being right but one of the important features of the aesthetic is that that distinction gets collapsed if we look back at the two children there isn't a distinction there between the plate being in the right place and looking in the right place being and seeming have come together and that's perhaps something that is really important for us to live in a world where every now and then being and seeming coincide so that nothing as it were deceives us anymore and I think this is part of the greatest social significance of the aesthetic and we live in a world which has been in many ways a glyph ID and it's a world that we want to redeem so that so that we're a part of it once again and our fulfillment is as it were reflected back to us from all the things that we encounter and that's really part of what I mean by Redemption and that is the function of the aesthetic and you can what this search for getting things right is a very it's an all pervasive thing you can no matter what circumstances you're in even if you're living in a trailer park you see you can do things right you go to your local timber merchant by the georgian windows to replace the rubbish that would otherwise be there have a little cornice and so on and you can even if there's a lot of money involved you can get things totally wrong and this this is a part of London too and as you can see there's someone's made a mistake here there's another example of a few miss London mistakes Minh here is getting it right this is a just an ordinary Victorian Street in London somebody's built a bridge across it to commit to buildings communicate but this is a totally different thing although there's lots of different buildings there they all harmonize they harmonize because they're standing along a street they're all built of vertical components which match each other classical details cornice and stringcourse and pilasters and so on and here's an example of a modern a tap town centre the centre of reading build built unlike this which is built entirely out of horrid of verticals this is built entirely out of horizontals and one of the most important differences between them is that everybody wants to live here and nobody wants to live here and nobody does live there the centre of reading was destroyed completely by this development and it's standing empty and vandalized and as you see covered in graffiti this emphasis on the horizontal was originally of course a very aesthetic thing the modernist aesthetic exemplified in this interior it's entirely designed in that way and you can see that yes that is a kind of aesthetic ideal nobody I'm sure has ever sat in this room but nevertheless you can see that you know that it has aesthetic thoughts behind it and unlike this which but but the modernists of course that were were in reaction against this all this Victorian clutter which again is something that most people would find extremely difficult to live with now but here is an example of a rather perfected modernist interior and which is linking Stein's house in Vienna which he designed for his sister and we can shine like me had the sense that that architecture ultimately must get the vertical emphases right and must make verticals stand in parallel to each other and it's the sense of detail that matters this is not my preferred form of architecture but you can see the aesthetic instinct at work in everything in this building he designed it for his sister who never lived in it and it ended up as the embassy of a communist country which for which it is wonderfully suited here is this is an example of what architects really can do of course when they when it comes to making corners this is the corner of a church in Rome by Pietro da Cortona where you see when you have the sense of detail on the classical idiom and this desire to fit things together how a building comes alive and captures the light of the Sun and it incorporates that light into itself makes it part of its own spirit so to speak so even in architecture the human spirit finds its embodiment and just in conclusion then those examples are really just sort of taken from from the air really but they're meant to to emphasize that that that the place of aesthetic judgment of our desire to get things right that the place of that in in our ordinary everyday life enterprise's builders and and dwellers people who settled down we know that three are free beings but we also know that free freedom demands recognition this is something that Hegel emphasized and it has to be re-expressed from ever for every generation we're not truly free until others recognize that we are free and grant us the space to be free in and then that means we're in in a relations of mutuality with each other freedom is my freedom as always as it were rubbing up against the edge of your freedom and that that boundary between us is the public world where we both belong and it's in shaping that boundary between us that the aesthetic the aesthetic sense the sense of aesthetic judgment is so important that's where in our search for recognition we from each other we attempt to to be graceful towards each other and to bring each other to to our side I bring you to my side you bring me to your side so that the boundary where we coincide is mutually acceptable and this is this is with over the wish you might reasonably call grace is a matter of harmony and fitting in and of course it can't be achieved without the habit of giving and receiving I give way to you you give way to me I'm offer you things and you receive them and so on this is what the public world ideally should be and that kind of giving and receiving of things is what should be embodied in our ideal forms of architecture as it is it embodied in this and on that note I think I'm going to stop and leave it to you to ask questions you you've presented us with two paintings of the Venus and suggested that Botticelli accomplishes something about communicating the truth of Venus in a way that the Virgo does not yet you still praise the Virgo for its use of colour and style so it seems there's the way that we can abstract certain elements of Judea or an art is there ever a case where there's a fault so great that it's something not the ER okay so the question is that I compared Botticelli's Venus with boo holes Venus and put pointed out that lo buho doesn't achieve that transcendental sense of the erotic he nevertheless is a highly competent painter with a grasp of the human form and grasp of color and Composition there's nothing there's no no way he can be faulted from the technical point of view but the question is might there not be works of art which we're there where the fault is so great that that it isn't even a competitor for art or something like that yeah of course there is there are totally incompetent painters as well if you are totally incompetent though the best way forward is to disguise it by pretending to be a modernist I think I think de Kooning is a very good example of this he never could paint he couldn't draw he couldn't paint and but he could disguise the fact by making it look as though he had done all that and he got through to the other side and I think they were you know these are difficult questions though in all art forms as a distinction between technical accomplishment and real really having something to say and I think that's really what people would say about buho of course he was accomplished but did he have anything to say you know and you see this if you can pass a bar with Vivaldi Vivaldi was Barker greatly admired Vivaldi because of his accomplishment but you know we would surely want to say yes that's all true but did you have anything to say you compare we've got bark we're saying I'll ask you to speak your question in about microphone thank you it seems very easy to take something that is pleased with the I say Aphrodite or David and transfigure it into a form of higher what would you say about something such as a crucifixion which is in normal life very odd Huma gets more time to time to get into higher this how is that this is a very interesting question through throughout history art has dealt with these extremely painful things and with human suffering you know Greek tragedy was focused on this and the Greeks were aware that actually art is one of the few areas where we are able to deal with suffering the Greek tragedy shows human suffering but also shows something like a transcendence of it you know that it's incorporated into the life of the of the tragic hero and in some way redeemed by that and of course in the Christian tradition the the redemption of suffering is there on the cross itself so that's surely than normal the normal theme of a crucifixion of course the suffering is there but there is also the redemption achieved through it some if it was just suffering with no sense that anything is achieved by it then there is a real question Gaia's matchings the of civil war in Spain well a Napoleonic Wars in in Spain you all recall of the court mutilated corpses stuff on trees and so on where all you see is suffering with no for no purpose a purposeless suffering that is very questionable as art its in fact he has he's making a mess he has a message but it is not the normal message that you expect us to convey hello yep and say a question you mentioned earlier in the lecture aren't the problem of utilitarian saturating modern culture just a question if the everything has a purpose in life and what why do miss music system platypus foreign other certain pages like that what's the purpose of a platypus I think that that's an interesting question but I was really talking about human life that we have purposes I don't think we have a purpose for a platypus that's true but we know our purposes nevertheless they govern what we do and they give us reasons for doing it you know I I have a reason for standing here because I've got a purpose which is to get through to the end of the discussion period etc but but the question is then given that that purpose governs my reasoning as to what I should be doing now what governs my reasoning as to whether I had that have that purpose is that a right purpose to have and we all have that question to know we have questions about our means but questions about our ends and learning to choose the right end is part of education just as much as choosing the right means and classical philosophers made a lot of this distinction aristotle distinguished virtue which is knowledge of the ends from from a skill which is knowledge of the means for achieving them and although that's simple I mean he what he said it's more complex than that but you know you can get the point and I think that it's something that we all recognize as soon as it's pointed out and then you realize that once you see things in that way that aesthetic judgment has to do with getting the ends right and not look at the means yes this is topic of beauty in art it seems to me that it's a search kind of like a search for well I can take the next existential approach in search for the transcendent that doesn't tire itself out so in a way it's kind of like a theological and illogical approach you agree with that well certainly it's one part of the artistic enterprise or it has been a part of the of the artistic Enterprise to try and find in the empirical world in which we live the marks of the transcendental and to bring them out so to speak and and show them whether an artist doesn't have to believe in God and or the afterlife to be to do this you know this is for instance Wagner interest and his older is trying to to extract from the experience of erotic love this sense of the transcendental as being the redemption of love as well and I think and that's what of course what Botticelli was up to and I think all poets have that that back of their mind and but of course not all exercise of aesthetic judgment is creating art on that level that's why at a certain stage I went downhill to the world of children and showed that nevertheless even their children are making these judgments and it's absolutely fundamental to their own self knowledge and the knowledge of how they fit into the community in which they live yeah I appreciate that you should the jeff koons piece clement greenberg said that Kitsch is his art that has had all of its cultural relevancy removed from it so that it could be sold and I think it's curious saying that that Koons I recently went to a lecture by the head of the Institute of classical art and architecture and he is redesigning Jeff Koons his house in a bleep classical style hmm filled with great masters not a single piece of Modern Art which tells me that Jeff Koons what he's trying to say with his art isn't he's trying to make money and he makes a lot now my question to that is Clement Greenberg said what's going to cure us of kitsch is the AMA dollar and so what happens when the oligarch becomes gay well the avant-garde of course was not immune from this disease of making things for sale and the D Clement creme Greenberg when he wrote his famous essay on avant-garde and Kitsch is explicitly referring to the Kooning as you know is that the art of the future was very carefully buying up de Kooning's that $1,000 a time and within a few years he was rich - because he everybody believed him and I think it's one of the it's one of the great problems of art general of visual art that it that it's consists of physical objects that can be owned poetry and music are not subject in quite the same way to this deformation that there isn't a market in in symphonies like there is a market in sculptures because nobody can own them and so the kitc disease interestingly in both the Kish disease and the modernist disease have been a very short-lived in those in music and literature and if you look and look today you know the novel is a very flourishing art form in both my country and this one and it's it contains some incredibly good stuff and you know there may be a bits of Kitsch here and there but when people see that it's Kitsch they say well ok I'll go on to the next book so it's some it has a lot to do with the with ownership on the issue of Jeff Koons his house this is not an unusual thing the architects who are most responsible for desecrating London that's Richard Rodgers Norman Foster they both live in Georgian houses in protected villages you know where they wouldn't allow a single intrusion of the stuff that they build so version that SLS is the end right and that may mean maybe think of some liberal theory both classical from say Hobbes on and also more modern marvels but it seems like essential to that both strands of liberal theory is a fundamental belief that there are no right meant and I'm wandering down to question if art is safe for democracy and how you put convinced maybe a more extreme liberal that aesthetics is really possible hmm well that's a those are difficult questions whether art is safe for democracy I don't know but you know art is not safe from democracy because people have terrible taste and there is you know an artistic culture you might want to say in the end requires some kind of artist some kind of aristocratic inheritance that people are embellishing the world in order to represent their their own power and and social superiority and so on all the great periods of of architecture and and painting have been like that but we don't want to beat we got we don't want to believe that because we know that democracy is here to stay and there there is a real problem then as to how one secures aesthetic values while allowing everybody the freedom that they naturally assumed to have aesthetic values of their own the normal response to this is to say well that we still have education then the purpose of education is to get people to examine their own values to come to some kind of coordination or some consensus and we do that in the moral sphere you know the Liberals extreme liberals of course are you let's put them on one side for a moment but ordinary American liberals nevertheless believe that the moral sphere is one of consensus and people gradually that they harmonize that their their actions and their beliefs and their judgments with each other because they know that the alternative is chaos and what is that's what good manners are about it's also ordinary morality is about so about those things there is a consensus and there has to be one the maybe something similar has to occur in the aesthetic sphere it hasn't occurred everywhere in the building of American cities it's undeniable and there's a kind of there was a time though when when it was there if you look at old New York look at the old photographs or look at what remains of it in lower Manhattan you will see it entirely consensual form of architecture emerging using cast iron pillars a cast iron pillars and Velasquez and so on and tin molded tin cornices and brick facades built onto the road and and all the rest and it's utterly harmonious and one result of this is of course that the New York City father's won't let it be pulled down and unlike modern buildings those buildings in lower Manhattan change their use you know some they are now most in their residences they have were warehouses modernist architecture doesn't change its use because it can't it's built for a purpose you know so there are there are lessons to learn from all those things which which indicate that even liberals do every now and then want to consensus and that in areas of a really matter tourist areas of value we work for that consensus we don't impose it from above like as a dictator would but nevertheless we try while respecting each other's freedom to to share the boundary that's really what I was talking about the necessity of art and I'm just wondering how what do you think art because over time the truth is not beautiful and I think we would all agree that is important in a work of art especially we're trying to convey able robust message yeah well this is some it's a really important question that I think again in the case of art the truth is integral to the whole enterprise and that of course is partly what what we don't like about kitsch it's it's a fake it's pretending to an emotion that it's not really expressing that's obviously true that Bouguereau painting of the Birth of Venus show it's pretending to a sublimity which isn't there and I think we're all very aware of this with with the written word it when reading a poem you know if you came across the phrase in the poem you know she was the apple of his eye you would say I've got a cliche and it can't be right this person isn't looking at what he isn't looking at the phenomenon and translating it properly into words and I think that's one of the the cracked the the standard of truth is has to be always there but what truth means is a very difficult thing you know Bouguereau would say well that you know nothing is more truthful to the female body than what I've done tell me where I've gone wrong and you want to say okay it's not that kind of truth you know something else is you're not it's not true to the human heart you're faking this emotion or something like that and then we take when moving to more abstract things like music you still want to say you know that there's a distinction between the true for and that and the self-deceived or something you know there's truth in Bruckner self-deception in Marla you know you won't you want to say that isn't really true but every note in Beethoven is true in some way as it's a truth to something but we don't know it's very difficult to say just what that thing is to which it is true but it's something like a human heart that isn't deceiving itself you know but I don't know how you know that I think this is one of them deepest problems in aesthetics that with this that you've raised that we know that truth has to be there but it isn't scientific truth it isn't a matter of facts rather than at that is another kind of truth the kind of truth whereby we live when Christ said I am the way the truth and the life I think he had that some sort of truth in his mind - yes I have the sense that until art I turned somewhat to the sacred or an ISA transcendent it will remain this sort of trend toward ugliness I see you probably really very miserable my one question though is is there any evidence in the world of ordinary art or the profane commercial art or any other art that we are turning back to beauty or is it really just an accelerating slide this is a real question obviously all our art schools in official art schools in Britain until recently were devoted to producing versions of - Charles a urinal or or Tracy Emmons bed I mean they are the same work of art anyway in effect things which require no skill but only a concept and concepts are wonderful in the mind of Kant or Newton but in the mind of an uneducated out student pointless so but we had there is there has been a growth of alternative art schools from below this is wonderful Jacob Collins in New York and the classical art college and there's another one in Seattle is one in in Ventura where I was talking recently in the Lutheran University all over America there these are springing up where people who really can paint and really can draw a teaching students to do life drawing here to sit in front of them a naked figure and and get it right and then incorporate that figure into a proper drama you know and use it in in conveying some sense of the importance of human experience and I think that it's creative writing programs also can be in a similar way devoted to teaching students just what the young lady was referring to how to how to say the truth you know how to find words which capture the truth and don't tell lies about it so and I think in in music too people are moving away from the harshest form of sort of modernist stuff too so I think that one shouldn't despair and in architecture there's the New Urbanism movement which is trying to tell to present a vision of architecture as a place as creating a place of settlement rather than just a functional object it depends on us in for it to work everybody in this if everyone in this room thought that it really mattered if beauty really matters and that we've have to stand up for it we're in every place where it's threatened I think a lot of this ugliness would go away thank you two questions if I can be prevented one is there a necessarily uneasy relationship between Beauty irony and second place is there going to be a sequel to your document well irony is a very interesting concept as a Greek concept of which Socrates made great play and and it's to be distinguished from sarcasm much modern art much desecrating art is sarcastic as I say it's taking something that people value and sneering at it but irony isn't like that it's taking something that people value and standing at a distance from it and you can stand at a distance from something while still creating Beauty effort this is what flow Barre said he was doing in Madame Bovary he called it Lea Haneke like you know Lafayette or petit eek irony which which takes nothing away from pathos and I think that is an artistic ideal in a way as for the documentary I I don't know whether they would ever be a sequel it's it depends upon hood working hoodwinking the Left establishment to provide money by telling whatever lies are necessary yeah doctor thank you very much for the talk I found it striking that photography and cinnabar or squirrels thoroughly absent your presentation tonight and I wonder if I think to ask you if you can say a word of what you see is the role of photography in cinema positive or negative with regard to the trends indicate distrusted right I didn't mention photography when discussing Renoir's landscape just to point out that of course a painter of a landscape is not taking a photograph of it and photography is open to abuse as as I was saying it just the accumulation of uninterpreted images this ephemeralization of everything in cinema of course photography is a very important part of it and the artistic use of photography is one of the most interesting topics to explore and I would say just in response to your question that of course it has to be guided by aesthetic judgment just like everything else and you don't just point a camera at the person as he says these lines and then move on to the next person who says his lines and so on you try and create out of the image something which comments upon those lines and reveals the deeper meaning of them if there is a deeper meaning of course cinema is as you know it's a art form in which the the artistic use of it is rare and these are specialized things okay people go to special art cinemas or they get them on CDs you to proceed to watch say the classical film like when one there's the son of the painter you know it was old black-and-white films that we knew when we were my generation who and we were young and perhaps there isn't so much of that going on a modern cinema is much more concentrated not on the artists artistic use of the camera but on the creation of spectacular effects and that's another issue whether an effect is really part of an aesthetic endeavor or whether it's a distraction from it I think that goes back to the question from Ryan Schinkel about the crucifixions that when in Mantegna's crucifixion which has a sort sort of serenity about it he's not painting all that suffering for effect on the country the effect is that is what precisely what he's trying to get away from it he wants to get to the meaning and you know this in cinema the effects are so easy to make who to create that maybe the meaning gets lost you

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Published: Tue Nov 18 2014