Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton

(soft orchestral music)

- At any time between 1750 and 1930,

if you had asked educated people

to describe the aim of
poetry, art, or music,

they would've replied, beauty.

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And if you had asked
for the point of that,

you would've learned
that beauty is a value

as important as truth and goodness.

(soft orchestral music)

Then in the 20th 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.

(soft opera music)

Not only has art made a cult of ugliness,

architecture too has
become soulless and sterile

and is not just our physical surroundings

that have become ugly.

Our language, our music, and our manners

are increasingly raucous, self-centered,

and offensive, as if 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 there is a danger that with it,

we will lose the meaning of life.

(soft orchestral music)

(lively orchestral music)

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 2000 years.

From its beginnings in ancient Greece,

philosophy has reflected
on the place of beauty

in art, poetry, music,
architecture, and everyday life.

(lively orchestral music)

Philosophers have argued that through

the pursuit of beauty,

we shape the world as a home.

We also 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 the
path out of that desert,

and it is a path that leads to home.

(lively orchestral music)

(lively piano music)

The great artists of the past

were aware that human life is
full of chaos and suffering,

but they had a remedy of this,

and the name of this remedy was beauty.

(lively piano music)

The beautiful work of art
brings consolation in sorrow

and affirmation in joy.

It shows human life to be worthwhile.

(lively piano music)

Many modern artists have become weary

of this sacred task.

The randomness of modern life, they think,

could not be redeemed by art.

Instead, it should be displayed.

The pattern was set nearly a century ago

by the French artist Marcel Duchamp

who signed a urinal with
a fictitious signature,

R. Mutt, and entered it for an exhibition.

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,

that showing that anything can be art.

Like a light going on and off.

(light music)

A can of excrement,

or even a pile of bricks.

No longer does art have a sacred status.

No longer does it raise
us to a higher moral

or spiritual plane.

It is just one human gesture among others,

no more meaningful than
a laugh or a shout.

- I think they're making fun of us.

It's a pile of bricks.

- 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 one that by now
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 doesn't 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.

(mischievous instrumental music)

- What you are also attempting to do,

as I understand it, was devalue the art

as an object simply by saying,

if I say it's a work of art,

that makes it a work of art.

- Yeah, but even the word work of art,

you see, is not so important for me.

I don't care about the word art

because it's been so,

you know, discredited, in such a word.

- [Joan] But you in fact
contributed to the discrediting,

didn't you, quite deliberately?

- Deliberately yes.

So I very want to get rid of it

because in a 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.

Artist Michael Craig-Martin,

who taught several of
the young British artists

whose work dominates the art world,

followed Duchamp's example
with his own seminal work

called An Oak Tree.

This consists of a glass
of water on a shelf

with a text explaining it is an oak tree.

When I first entered St. Peter's

and confronted Michelangelo's Pieta,

for me, that was a
transporting experience.

My life was changed by this.

Do you think that someone
can have the same experience

with Duchamp's urinal, or perhaps,

with your oak tree, which is
after all a similar thing?

- I know that when I was a teenager,

and I first came upon Duchamp,

and I first came upon the ready mades,

I was absolutely stunned in amazement.

I don't think people are overwhelmed

by a sense of beauty
when they see the urinal.

It's not meant to be beautiful,

but that doesn't mean that
there isn't something about it

that doesn't captivate the imagination,

and I think captivate the imagination

is the key to what an artwork seeks to do.

Duchamp felt that art had become

too interested in techniques,

too interested in optics.

He felt that it had become

intellectually and morally corrupt.

Now his reason for making an artwork

that didn't fit the
system was not cynicism.

It was in order to say
I'm trying to make an art

that denies all of the things

that people say art should have

because I'm trying to say
the central question of art

rests somewhere else.

- I take that point that
things had to change.

Duchamp was trying to change them,

but what was he trying to change them to?

- Well, he could never,
in his wildest dreams,

have imagined what would
happen would happen,

or that he himself, I'm
sure he had no idea,

how central the thing was
that he had stumbled upon,

that he had come upon,

essentially that a work of art

is a work of art because
we think of it as such.

I also think it's important to say

that the notion of
beauty has been extended

to include things that would
not have been thought of.

That's part of the artist's function,

is to make beautify, make one
see something as beautiful,

something that nobody
thought was beautiful

up until now.

- Right, like a can of shit.

- Well, I'm not sure that it's beautiful,

but if you take an example

that's not trying to be beautiful,

if you take say Jeff Koons,

Jeff Koons has some things

which are truly astoundingly beautiful.

- [Roger] It's like so much kitsch to me,

but kitsch with sugar on.

- [Michael] This is the
subject matter of his work,

not the substance of his work.

- What is the use of this art?

What does it help people to do?

- I think it hopefully allows people

to see the world in which they are living

in a way that gives it
more meaning to them,

and it's not the world of an ideal world

of some other world, some better place,

but of the here and now,

of the world that they're in,

and are trying to live more at ease

within the world that they're given.

(discordant instrumental music)

- So the art of today shows
us the world as it is.

The here and now and
all its imperfections.

But is the result really art?

Surely something is not a work of art

because it offers a slice of reality,

ugliness included, and calls itself art.

("Cello Suite Number One" by Bach)

Art needs creativity,

and creativity is about sharing.

It is a call to others to see the world

as the artist sees it.

That is why we find beauty

in the naive art of children.

Children are not giving us ideas

in the place of creative images,

nor are they wallowing in ugliness.

They are trying to affirm
the world as they see it

and to share what they feel.

Something of the child's
pure delight in creation

survives in every true work of art.

But creativity is not enough,

and the skill of the true artist

is to show the real in
the light of the ideal,

and so, transfigure it.

This is what Michelangelo achieves

in his great portrayal of David.

But when we encounter a
concrete cast of the David,

perhaps it's part of
some garden arrangement,

it is not beautiful at all,

for it lacks the essential
ingredient of creativity.

(upbeat electronic music)

(soft instrumental music)

Discussions of the kind I have
been having are dangerous.

In our democratic culture,

people often think it is threatening

to judge another person's taste.

Some are even offended by the suggestion

that there is a difference
between good and bad taste,

or that it matters what you look at

or read or listen to.

But this doesn't help anybody.

There are standards of beauty

which have a firm base in human nature,

and we need to look for them

and build them into our lives.

Maybe people have lost
their faith in beauty

because they have lost
their belief in ideals.

All there is, they are tempted to think,

is the world of appetite.

There are no values other
than utilitarian ones.

Something has a value if it has a use,

and what's the use of beauty?

All art is absolutely
useless wrote Oscar Wilde,

who intended his remark as praise.

For Wilde, beauty of a value
higher than usefulness.

People need useless things

just as much as, even more than

they need things with a use.

Just think of it.

What is the use of love,
of friendship, of worship?

None whatsoever.

And the same goes for beauty.

Our consumer society
puts usefulness first,

and beauty is no better
than a side effect.

Since art is useless, it
doesn't matter what you read,

what you look at, what you listen to.

♫ I see you baby

♫ Shaking that ass

♫ Shaking that ass

♫ Shaking that ass

We are besieged by message on every side,

titillated, tempted by appetite,

never at rest, and that is one reason

why beauty is disappearing from our world.

♫ Shaking that ass

♫ Shaking that ass

Getting and spending, wrote Wordsworth,

we lay waste our powers.

♫ Shaking that ass

♫ Shaking that ass

In our culture today,

the advert is more important
than the work of art,

and artworks often try
to capture our attention

as adverts do, by being
brash or outrageous,

like this bejeweled platinum
skull by Damien Hirst.

Lie adverts, today's works of art

aim to create a brand, even if
they have no product to sell,

except themselves.

(crowd chattering)

(somber orchestral music)

(building collapsing and shattering)

Beauty is assailed from two directions,

by the cult of ugliness in the arts

and by the cult of
utility in everyday life.

These two cults come together

in the world of modern architecture.

(somber orchestral music)

At the turn of the 20th century,

architects, like artists, began
to be impatient with beauty

and to put utility in its place.

The American architect, Louis Sullivan,

expressed the credo of the modernists

when he said that form follows function.

In other words, stop thinking about

the way a building looks

and think instead about what it does.

Sullivan's doctrine has been used

to justify the greatest
crime against beauty

that the world has yet seen,

and that is the crime
of modern architecture.

(tense instrumental music)

I grew up near Reading,

which was a charming Victorian town

with terraced streets and Gothic churches

crowned by elegant public buildings

and smart hotels.

But in the 1960s, things began to change.

Here, in the center, the
homely streets were demolished

to make way for office blocks,
a bus station, and car parks,

all designed without
consideration for beauty,

and the result proves as clearly as can be

that if you consider only utility,

the things you build will soon be useless.

This building is boarded up

because nobody has a use for it.

Nobody has a use for it

because nobody wants to be in it.

Nobody wants to be in it

because the thing is so damned ugly.

(somber instrumental music)

Everywhere you turn, there
is ugliness and mutilation.

The offices and bus station
have been abandoned.

The only things at home here

are the pigeons fouling the pavements.

Everything has been vandalized.

But we shouldn't blame the vandals.

This place was built by vandals,

and those who added the graffiti

merely finished the job.

Most of our towns and
cities have areas like this

in which buildings erected
merely for their utility

have rapidly become useless,

not that architects
learned from the disaster.

(explosion)

(glass crashing and shattering)

When the public began to react

against the brutal concrete
style of the 1960s,

architects simply replaced it

with a new kind of junk, glass walls

hung on steel frames with absurd details

that don't match.

Result is another kind of failure to fit.

It is there simply to be demolished.

(funky music)

(light music)

In the midst of all this desolation,

we find a fragment of the
streets that were destroyed.

Once a forge, now a cafe.

People come here from all around

because it is the last
bit of life remaining,

and the life comes from the building.

(light music)

This returns me to Oscar Wilde's remark

that all art is absolutely useless.

Put usefulness first, and you lose it.

Put beauty first, and what you do

will be useful forever.

It turns out that nothing is more useful

than the useless.

(light music)

We see this in traditional architecture

with its decorative details.

Ornaments liberate us from
the tyranny of the useful

and satisfy our need for harmony.

In a strange way, they
make us feel at home.

They remind us that we have
more than practical needs.

We are not just governed
by animal appetites

like eating and sleeping.

We have spiritual and moral needs too,

and if those needs go
unsatisfied, so do we.

(soft orchestral music)

We all know what it is like

even in the everyday world

suddenly to be transported
by the things we see

from the ordinary world of our appetites

to the illuminated
sphere of contemplation.

A flash of sunlight, a remembered melody,

the face of someone
loved, these dawn on us

in the most distracted moments,

and suddenly, life is worthwhile.

(soft orchestral music)

These are timeless moments

in which we feel the presence
of another and higher world.

From the beginning of
Western civilization,

poets and philosophers have
seen the experience of beauty

as calling us to the divine.

Plato, writing in Athens
in the fourth century BC,

argued that beauty is the sign

of another and higher order.

Beholding beauty with the
eye of the mind, he wrote,

you will be able to nourish true virtue

and become the friend of God.

Plato was an idealist.

He believed that human beings are pilgrims

and passengers in this world

while always aspiring beyond it

to the eternal realm where
we will be united with God.

God exists in a transcendental world

to which we humans aspire,

but which we cannot know directly.

But one way of glimpsing that
heavenly sphere here below

is through the experience with beauty.

This leads to a paradox.

For Plato, beauty was first and foremost

the beauty of the human
face and the human form.

The love of beauty, he thought,

originates in eros, a
passion that all of us feel.

We would call this passion romantic love.

For Plato, eros was a cosmic force

which flows through us in
the form of sexual desire.

But if human beauty arouses desire,

how can it have anything
to do with the divine?

Desire is for the individual
living in this world.

It is an urgent passion.

Sexual desire presents us with a choice,

adoration or appetite, love or lust.

Lust is about taking,
but love is about giving.

Lust brings ugliness, the
ugliness of human relations

in which one person treats another

as a disposable instrument.

To reach the source of beauty,

we must overcome lust.

(playful instrumental music)

(somber instrumental music)

This longing without lust
is what we mean today

by platonic love.

When we find beauty in a youthful person,

it is because we glimpse
the light of eternity

shining in those features

from a heavenly source beyond this world.

(soft instrumental music)

The beautiful human form is an invitation

to unite with it
spiritually, not physically.

Our feeling for beauty is, therefore,

a religious and not a sensual emotion.

(soft instrumental music)

This theory of Plato's is astonishing.

Beauty, he thought, is a
visitor from another world.

We can do nothing with it save contemplate

its pure radiance.

Anything else pollutes and desecrates it,

destroying its sacred aura.

(soft instrumental music)

Plato's theory may seem
quaint to people today,

but it is one of the most
influential theories in history.

Throughout our civilization,

poets, storytellers, painters,
priests, and philosophers

have been inspired by Plato's
views on sex and love.

If we are to just look
in the poetry corner

as to then books by people
who have tried to express

the Platonic vision of the erotic,

let's see who there is.

Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur,
John Donne Here and There,

Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer,

especially The Knight's Tale,

The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript,

incredible expressions of
the Platonic love here,

Cavalcanti, who is the master of Dante,

and Dante himself definitely,

oh Spencer of course, The Fairy Queen,

Dafydd ap Gwilym, to take
the Welsh version of it all,

The Women Troubadours, Christina Rosetti.

I don't believe it more
Victorian about it.

Ah, so it goes on.

(soft instrumental music)

The early Renaissance
painter Sandro Botticelli

illustrated the theory
in this famous painting,

which shows the birth of
Venus, goddess of erotic love.

Venus looks on the world
from a place beyond desire.

She is inviting us to
transcend our earthly appetites

and unite with her through
the pure love of beauty.

Botticelli's model was Simonetta Vespucci.

Botticelli loved her until
the end of her short life

and actually asked to
be buried at her feet.

She represented to him Plato's ideal.

This was beauty to be
contemplated but not possessed.

(soft instrumental music)

Plato and Botticelli are telling us

that real beauty lies
beyond sexual desire,

so we can find beauty not only
in a desirable young person

but also in a face full
of age, grief, and wisdom,

such as Rembrandt painted.

(soft instrumental music)

The beauty of a face is a symbol

of the life expressed in it.

It is flesh become spirit,

and in fixing our eyes on it,

we seem to see right
through into the soul.

Painters like Rembrandt are important

for showing us that beauty is an ordinary,

everyday kind of thing.

It lies all around us.

We need only the eyes to see it

and the hearts to feel.

The most ordinary event can be made

into something beautiful by a painter

who can see into the heart of things.

(soft instrumental music)

So long as the belief
in a transcendental god

was firmly anchored in the
heart of our civilization,

artists and philosophers
continued to think of beauty

in Plato's way.

Beauty was the revelation of God

in the here and now.

This religious approach to the beautiful

lasted for 2000 years.

But in the 17th century,
the scientific revolution

began to sow the seeds of doubt.

(soft instrumental music)

The medieval church
accepted the ancient view

that the Earth lies at the
center of the universe.

Then, Copernicus and Galileo
proved that the Earth

circles the sun, and Newton
completed their work,

describing a clockwork universe

in which each moment follows mechanically

from the one before.

(soft instrumental music)

This was the Enlightenment vision

which described our world

as though there was no place in it

for gods and spirits,

no place for values and ideals,

no place for anything save
the regular clockwork movement

which turned the moon around the Earth

and the Earth around the sun

for no purpose whatsoever.

(soft instrumental music)

At the heart of Newton's universe

is a God shaped hole, a spiritual vacuum,

and one philosopher in particular

set out to fill this vacuum.

That is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.

(light instrumental music)

Science explains things,
but, thought Shaftesbury,

its account of the world
is in one way incomplete.

We can see the world
from another perspective,

not seeking to use it or explain it,

but simply contemplating its appearance

as we might contemplate
a landscape or a flower.

(light instrumental music)

The idea that the world is
intrinsically meaningful,

full of an enchantment, that
it needs no religious doctrine

to perceive answered to
a deep emotional need.

Beauty was not planted
in the world by God,

but discovered there by people.

(soft instrumental music)

Shaftesbury's idea
encouraged the cult of beauty

which raised the appreciation
of art and nature

to the place once occupied
by the worship of God.

Beauty was to fill the God shaped hole

made by science.

(soft instrumental music)

Artists were no longer illustrators

of the sacred stories who worked
as servants of the church.

They were discovering the
stories for themselves

by interpreting the secrets of nature.

Landscapes which used
to be mere backgrounds

to holy images became foregrounds

with the human figure
often lost in their folds.

(soft instrumental music)

But for Shaftesbury, it
does not need a work of art

to present us with the
beauty of the world.

We simply need to look on things

with clear eyes and free emotions.

Shaftesbury is telling
us to stop using things,

stop explaining them and exploiting them,

but look at them instead.

Then we will understand what they mean.

The message of the flower is the flower.

(light instrumental music)

Zen Buddhists have said similar things.

Only by leaving all our interests
and business to one side

do we encounter the real
truth of the flower.

Seeing things that way,
we discover their beauty.

(soft instrumental music)

The greatest philosopher
of the Enlightenment,

Immanuel Kant, was profoundly influenced

by Shaftesbury's idea.

Kant argued that the experience of beauty

comes when we put our
interests to one side,

when we look on things
not in order to use them

for our purposes or to
explain how they work

or to satisfy some need or appetite,

but simply to absorb them
and to endorse what they are.

(soft instrumental music)

Consider the joy you might feel

when you hold a friend's
baby in your arms.

You don't want to do
anything with the baby.

You don't want to eat
it, to put it to any use,

or to conduct scientific
experiments on it.

You want simply to look at it

and to feel the great
surge of delight that comes

when you focus all your
thoughts on this baby

and none at all on yourself.

(soft instrumental music)

That is what Kant described

as a disinterested attitude,

and it is the attitude that underlies

our experience of beauty.

To explain this is extremely difficult

because if you haven't experienced it,

you don't really know what it is,

but everybody listening to
a beautiful piece of music,

looking at a sublime landscape,

reading a poem which seems to contain

the essence of the thing it describes,

everybody in an experience like that

says yes, this is enough.

(soft piano music)

But why is this experience so important?

The encounter with beauty is so vivid,

so immediate, so personal that it seems

hardly to belong to the ordinary world,

yet beauty shines on us
from ordinary things.

Is it a feature of the world

or a figment of the imagination?

Most of the time, our lives are organized

by our everyday concerns,
but every now and then,

we find ourself jolted
out of our complacency

in the presence of something
vastly more important

than our immediate desires and interests,

something not of this world.

From Plato to Kant,
philosophers have tried

to capture the peculiar way
in which beauty dawns on us.

Like a sudden ray of sunlight

or a surge of love.

For Plato, the only explanation
of such an experience

was its transcendental origin.

It speaks to us like the voice of God.

And Kant too in a much more sober way

believed that the experience of beauty

connects us with the
ultimate mystery of being.

Through beauty, we are
brought into the presence

of the sacred.

We can understand what
such philosophers mean

if we reflect on what we feel
in the presence of death,

especially the death of someone loved.

We look with awe on the human body

from which their life has fled.

We are reluctant to touch the dead body.

We see it as not properly
a part of our world,

almost a visitor from some other sphere.

And the same sense of the transcendental

arises in the experience
that inspired Plato,

the experience of falling in love.

("Les Contes d'Hoffmann" by Offenbach)

This too is a human universal,

and it is an experience
of the strangest kind,

the face and body of the beloved

are imbued with the intensest life,

but in one crucial respect,

they are like the body of someone dead.

They seem not to belong
in the everyday world.

Poets have expended thousands of words

on this experience which no words

seem entirely to capture.

But these great changes
in the stream of life,

the urge to unite with another person,

the loss of someone loved,

are moments that we understand as sacred.

(discordant instrumental music)

If we look at the history
of the idea of beauty,

we see that philosophers and artists

have had good reason to connect
the beautiful and the sacred

and to see our need for beauty

as something deep in our nature,

part of our longing for consolation

in a world of danger,
sorrow, and distress.

(discordant instrumental music)

Today, many artists look on the
idea of beauty with disdain,

a leftover from a vanished way of living

which has no real
connection with the world

which now surrounds us.

(discordant instrumental music)

So there has been a desire to desecrate

the experiences of sex and death

by displaying them in
trivial and impersonal ways

that destroy all sense of
their spiritual significance.

(discordant instrumental music)

Just as those who lose their religion

have an urge to mock the
faith that they have lost,

so do artists today feel an urge

to treat human life in demeaning ways

and to mock the pursuit of beauty.

This willful desecration
is also a denial of love,

an attempt to remake the world

as though love were no
longer a part of it,

and this, it seems to me, is
the most important feature

of our post-modern culture,

that it is a loveless culture

determined to portray the
human world as unlovable.

(soft instrumental music)

Of course this habit of dwelling

on the distressing side
of human life isn't new.

From the beginning of our civilization,

it has been one of the tasks of art

to take what is most painful
in the human condition

and to redeem it in a work of beauty.

(man screaming)

- Oh you are men of stones.

Had I your tongues and eyes,

I'd use them so that
heaven's vault should crack.

She's gone forever.

(lively piano music)

- Art has the ability to redeem life

by finding beauty even in
the worst aspect of things.

Mantegna's crucifixion,
displaying the cruelest

and most ugly of deaths,

achieves a kind of majesty and serenity.

It redeems the horror that it shows.

In the face of death,
human beings can still show

nobility, compassion, and dignity,

and art helps us to accept death

by presenting it in such a light.

(quick piano music)

What about things which are not tragic

but merely sordid or depraved?

Can art find beauty even here?

(frantic instrumental music)

This painting by Delacroix

shows us the artist's bed
in all its sordid disorder.

He too is bringing beauty
to a thing that lacks it

and bestowing a kind of blessing

on his own emotional chaos.

Delacroix says, see how
these sweat stained sheets

record the troubled dreams,

the tormented energy of the
person who has left them,

and how the light picks them out

as though they are still
animated by the sleeper.

The bed is transformed by the creative act

to become something else,

a vivid symbol of the human condition,

and one which makes a bond
between us and the artist.

(lively cello music)

Some people describe Tracey
Emin's bed in that way,

but there is all the
difference in the world

between a real work of art

which makes ugliness beautiful

and the fake work of art

which shares the ugliness that it shows.

This is modern life presented

in all its randomness and disorder.

- [David] What is it that makes that art

rather than just a rumpled bed?

- Well, the first thing that makes it art

is because I say that it is.

- [David] You say that it is.

- I say that it is.

- [David] The second thing
is the Tate says it is.

But what do you want the viewer,

the visitor to the gallery to say?

You presumably don't want him to say

I think that's beautiful.

- No, no one's actually
said that, only me.

- You think it's beautiful?

- Yeah I do.
- You do think it's beautiful.

- I think it beautiful yeah.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be sharing it.

- How can this be a beautiful work of art

if it makes no attempt to transform

the raw material of an idea?

It is just one sordid
reality among others,

literally an unmade bed.

(light instrumental music)

We are back with the question

raised by Duchamp's urinal

whether anything can be art.

This question occupies both
the would-be innovators

and the traditionalists
like Alexander Stoddart,

a monumental sculptor whose
works stand in public places

around the world as well
as in the Queen's gallery

at Buckingham Palace.

A defender of conceptual art

might say that an idea can be beautiful,

so that there's nothing wrong
with conceptual art as such.

- Yes, but this is in
everybody's field of endeavor.

The lawyer can come up
with a beautiful idea.

You know, the statesman, the medic.

Let's cure cancer, a beautiful idea,

but he doesn't say he's an
artist in the back of that.

Conceptual art, of course,
is entirely world bound.

It is in fact a kind
of art that's exhausted

in its veritable description,

so you need to just say,

half a cow in a tank of formaldehyde,

and you're really all the way there.

The object itself then can be dumped.

Tracey Emin's bed is a
perfect example of that.

If you walked past a skip in some scheme

and you saw that bed lying there,

you would walk on, but of course,

if you saw even just the torso

of the Apollo Belvedere
lying in that skip,

you would be arrested by it,

and you may even climb in
and try to retrieve it.

Many students come to me
from sculpture departments,

secretly of course, because they don't

want to tell their
tutors that they've come

to chat with the enemy,

and they say I try to
become a model figure,

and I modeled it in clay,
and then a tutor came up

and told me to cut it in half

and dump some diarrhea on top of it,

and that will make it interesting.

- It's what I feel about the kind of

standardized desecration that
passes for art these days

is actually a kind of immorality

because it is an attempt to obliterate

meaning from the human form in some way.

- Well it's intent to
obliterate knowledge.

(light instrumental music)

- The art establishment has turned away

from the old curriculum

which put beauty and craft
at the top of the agenda.

Those like Alexander
Stoddart who try to restore

the age old connection
between the beautiful

and the sacred are seen as
old fashioned and absurd.

(light instrumental music)

The same kind of criticism
is aimed at traditionalists

in architecture.

One target is Leon Krier,

architect of the Prince
of Wales' model town

of Poundbury.

(light instrumental music)

Designing modest streets,
laid out in traditional ways,

using the well tried
and much loved details

that have served us down the centuries,

Leon Krier as created
a genuine settlement.

The proportions are human proportions.

The details are restful to the eye.

(light instrumental music)

This is not great or original architecture

nor does it try to be.

It is a modest attempt to get things right

by following patterns and examples

laid down by tradition.

This is not nostalgia,
but knowledge passed on

from age to age.

Architecture that doesn't respect the past

is not respecting the present

because it is not respecting
people's primary need

from architecture, which is to build

a longstanding home.

(lively instrumental music)

I have shown some of the ways

in which artists and architects

have followed the call of beauty.

In doing so, they have
given our world meaning.

(lively instrumental music)

The masters of the past recognized

that we have spiritual needs

as well as animal appetites.

For Plato, beauty was a path to God

while thinkers of the Enlightenment

saw art and beauty as ways
in which we save ourselves

from meaningless routines

and rise to a higher level.

But art turned its back on beauty.

It became a slave to the consumer culture

feeding our pleasures and addictions

and wallowing in self-disgust.

(lively instrumental music)

That, it seems to me, is the lesson

of the ugliest forms of
modern art and architecture.

They do not show reality,
but take revenge on it,

spoiling what might have been a home

and leaving us to wander
unconsoled and alienated

in a spiritual desert.

Of course it is true that there
is much in the world today

that distracts and troubles us.

Our lives are full of leftovers.

We battle through lies and distraction,

and nothing resolves.

(lively instrumental music)

The right response, however,

is not to endorse this alienation.

It is to look for the
path back from the desert,

one that will point us to a place

where the real and the ideal
may still exist in harmony.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

In my own life, I have found this path

more easily through music

than through any other art form.

Pergolesi was 26 when he
wrote the Stabat Mater.

It describes the grief of the holy virgin

beside the cross of the dying Christ.

All the suffering of the world

is symbolized in its exquisite lines.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

Given that Pergolesi was
suffering from tuberculosis

when he wrote the Stabat Mater,

he is that son dying on the cross too.

In fact, he died within a few months

of the work's completion.

This is not a complex or
ambitious piece of music,

simply a heartfelt expression

of the composer's faith.

It shows the way in which
deep and troubling emotions

can achieve unity and
freedom through music.

The voice of Mary is
written for two singers.

The melody rises slowly, painfully,

resolving dissonance only to be gripped

by another dissonance as the voices clash,

representing the conflict
and sorrow within her.

- [Catherine] Why don't
I just give you, bar 18?

- [Roger] Okay, good idea.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

- Here we have a very
simple and sacred text.

The mother stands grieving
and weeping at the cross

on which her son is hanging.

That's really all that you have to say.

- And a completely unmusical person

would be immediately get the message

that it's a piece of
grieving, wouldn't they?

There can be no possible doubt about that.

- The music takes over the words

and makes them speak to you

in another language in your own heart.

- Well it means that today,
in our secular world,

that it can delight and move

without people having to know.

- [Roger] Yes, exactly.

- What it's about.

- We learn without the
theological apparatus

that there is this thing called suffering,

and that it's at the destiny of all of us,

but also is not the end of all of us.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

In this film, I have described beauty

as an essential resource.

Through the pursuit of beauty,

we shape the world as a home,

and in doing so, we both amplify our joys

and find consolation for our sorrows.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

Art and music shine a light of meaning

on ordinary life, and through them,

we are able to confront
the things that trouble us

and to find consolation and
peace in their presence.

This capacity of beauty
too redeem our suffering

is one reason why beauty can be seen

as a substitute for religion.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

Why give priority to religion?

Why not say that religion
is a beauty substitute?

Better still, why describe
the two as rivals?

The sacred and the beautiful
stand side by side,

two doors that open onto a single space,

and in that space, we find our home.

("Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi)

- [Broadcaster] And our
Modern Beauty season

continues on Monday night with large scale

pieces of public art
challenging the six finalists

of the School of Saatchi at nine.

Next tonight on BBC Two, this week's

Have I Got News For You

complete with extra bits.