Beauty Still Matters

'Modern man has bought into the broken merchandise of aesthetic subjectivism, ... resulting in ... art that deif(ies) ugliness as if it were a new form of beauty.'

From The European Conservative

By Itxu Díaz

Modern man has bought into the broken merchandise of aesthetic subjectivism, after first embracing ethical subjectivism, resulting in countless works of art that deify ugliness as if it were a new form of beauty.

If art still aspires to beauty, then it may well be defined as the opposite of whatever Elisabeth Ohlson does. “The relativity of taste is an apology voiced by bad times,” wrote Nicolas Gómez Dávila, aptly describing the reigning sentiment of our own epoch. Artists who want to destroy their art; worshippers of the ephemeral; architects who seem to be trying to capture the essence of Satan’s soul, even when they are designing churches. Poets who deconstruct their verses; countless hustlers looking to get their hands into the right public purses. Sordid and masculinized female canons matched by disgusting and feminized masculine canons. A passion for farce, for the perishable, for the inhuman. Seen in this light, it is unsurprising that our century has produced the longest waiting lines in history at the doors of mental health professionals. 

Where has beauty gone? It has been canceled, even outlawed. From Plato to Leonardo, none of the great aesthetic theorists of past centuries would have believed us if we told them that beauty would be canceled—that, for example, beautiful women’s bodies would no longer be displayed in the catalogs of fashion brands because gender ideology has concluded that this would stigmatize the ugly, the fat, and the amorphous. The reasons are unimportant because they are simply unreasonable. What is important is that, by the rules of contemporary culture, beauty must be hidden no matter what.

For this reason, the time in which we live is one of darkness, of the exaltation of the bad, and the sacralization of the ugly, the unnatural, the disorderly, and the dirty. The artistic modus operandi of our times is to sink the soul and its higher faculties in the mud of animalistic instinct, to silence the mind with sentimentalism, and to extirpate transcendence from the human experience. 

Art often serves to give us a measure of the heart of the man in a given era. In that test tube of nonsense that we call contemporary art, we discover the continuous and tiresome denial of the search for beauty, the search for truth, and of any yearning for eternity. The only thing that matters is constant novelty, and within that, the only thing that matters is provocation. This is a damning indictment of the heart of modern man. 

At the heart of all cultural struggle lies the age-old contest between good and evil, between truth and lies, between the beautiful and the ugly. You can see it any newspaper. We mistakenly think that contemporary art, literature, cinema, and music seek to reflect our way of living and thinking today. On the contrary, if anything, the reverse is more true: the aim of so much contemporary art is to model social reality, in order to give rise tomorrow to what is projected today on screens, paintings, and television series. The motif of destruction of contemporary art—with its strange cult of excrement, nonsense, and trash—is perhaps the extreme example of how the gradual elimination of the ideals of beauty turns us little by little into naked animals, unhappy and hopeless subjects, who aspire only to the hedonism of the present minute.

For example, in 2015, when, at the ARCO Fair in Madrid, Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto presented Glass Half Full—yes, a glass half full of water, worth 20,000 euros—everyone understood that the perversion of art had broken at the same time with its search for beauty and its longing for eternity. A journalist asked Prieto if anyone who placed an identical glass at home and filled it halfway would have a work of art. The artist replied instantly: “No, you would have a copy.”

Beauty is timeless

Conservatives are not ashamed of old ideas, deeds, and convictions, but instead draw inspiration from them. Those who began by setting fire to cities, encouraging bloody revolutions, beheading monarchs and bourgeoisie, and destroying churches and works of art, while reasoning that the ends of universal social justice justify the means, are the ones who should be ashamed. Unfortunately, they are not, because they stubbornly refuse to look back upon the past—that is why they have been called progressives, because they supposedly only look towards tomorrow. 

On the other hand, if we conservatives look back, we can embrace the artistic subtlety of classical Greece, the enlargement of the spirit, and the glorification of beauty as an elevator to transcendence; we will always be on the side of history belonging to those who walk in search of something higher.  A conservatism that does not aim for transcendence is not truly conservatism, but only an ideological sham, a psychological pseudo-contract with oneself to hide behind a conservative mask and maintain a good conscience in political affairs. 

However, there is no transcendence without beauty. Roger Scruton never tired of repeating it: “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” “Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental,” he explained in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. “Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends.’”

The Polish philosopher Wladislaw Tatarkiewiczm, who spent his life pondering the history of aesthetics, beauty, and art, traced the complex etymological history of the word beauty, which encompasses a broad spectrum. Once including what we now know as good, its meaning was narrowed down to what we now know as beautiful. In Hellenistic Greece, Plotinus asserted that beauty is an expression of the soul, so that the beautiful is spiritual, while the material is only beautiful to the extent that it is infused by the spirit. Throughout the history of Western culture, the predominant belief has been that there is something eternal in beauty. Where this sense of the eternal comes from can vary: it can be beauty’s origin, the image it represents, or, inter alia, the aspiration for a future. 

True beauty is timeless: it is a light that never goes out, no matter how dark everything around it becomes. If, in the Italian Renaissance, beauty was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to avoid it—one  cannot walk through the center of Florence without being overwhelmed by Santa Maria del Fiore—in our own postmodern era, beauty shines even brighter precisely by its contrast to the ugliness that inundates everything else. 

Modern man has bought into the broken merchandise of aesthetic subjectivism, after first embracing ethical subjectivism, resulting in countless works of art that deify ugliness as if it were a new form of beauty. If one wished for a proof of how the renunciation of beauty in architecture can reflect the rotten soul of a nation, you have but to compare the streets and buildings of the Soviet era with the radiance of the rest of the free world. Even those who have swallowed the idea that beauty is an infinite range of subjectivities are unable to erase the primitive trace that their soul carries, that yearning for eternity that unconsciously pushes them to seek transcendent truth, goodness, and beauty. If that is what conservatism pursues, then it could be argued that everyone is, in some corner of their soul, conservative.

I have always believed that beauty is an indirect and distant reflection of God. And that is enough to reject any subjectivist temptation. I have always been attracted to the thesis of St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom beauty is not a pleasure that permits admiration, but consists in the objective properties that make contemplation pleasurable. In other words, beauty, like goodness, is in the object and not merely in the observer, and beauty will continue to exist in the world whether or not there are people to contemplate it. This consideration should give us hope, for perhaps it is not entirely correct to say that the world has been flooded with ugliness and evil, but merely that we may also be losing our ability to see beauty and goodness. 

Yes, beauty is important. Beauty still matters. For in beauty is the mystery of goodness expressed in visible form; in beauty is the imprint of the transcendent God. Therefore, in times of revolution and culture war, we conservatives have nothing more important to conserve—aside from the head on our shoulders—than beauty.