Why Beauty Matters (2009) - full transcript

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you
had asked educated people to describe the

aim of poetry, art or music,
they would have replied, beauty.

And if you had asked
for the point of that,

you would have learned
that beauty is a value,

as important as
truth and goodness..

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.

Not only has art made
a cult of ugliness,

architecture, too, has
become soulless and sterile.



And it's not just our physical
surroundings that have become ugly.

Our language, our music, and our
manners are increasingly raucous,

self-centered, and
offensive, as though 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.

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.

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 is a path that
leads to home.

The great artists of the past

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

But they had a remedy for this, and
the name of that remedy was beauty.

The beautiful work of
art brings consolation

in sorrow and
affirmation in joy.

It shows human life
to be worthwhile.

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-Mut, 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,

as showing that
anything can be art.

Like a light going on and off.

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.

What you were also attempting
to do, as I understand it,

was to 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 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
and so forth.

But you, in fact,
contributed to the

discrediting, didn't
you, quite deliberately?

Deliberately, yes.
So I really want to get rid of it,

because the 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
why it is an oak tree.

When I first entered St Peter's and
confronted Michelangelo's Pietà,

For me, that was a
transporting experience.

My life was changed by this.

Do you think that someone
could 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 Maids,

I was absolutely
stunned and 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 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 that the central
question of art rests somewhere else.

I take the point that
things had to change,

and 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 that 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 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 beautiful,

make one see
something as beautiful,

something that nobody thought
was beautiful up until now.

Right, 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 done some things
which are truly astoundingly beautiful.

It's like so much kitsch to
me, but kitsch with sugar on.

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, hopefully, it 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 of trying to live
more at ease within

the world that they're given.

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 just

because it offers a
slice of reality, ugliness

included and calls itself art?

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're 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 as

part of some garden arrangement,
it is not beautiful at all.

For it lacks the essential
ingredient of creativity.

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 wild, beauty was a
value higher than usefulness.

People need useless
things just as much as

even more than they
need things for their 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.

We are besieged by
messages on every side,

titillated, tempted by
appetite, never at rest.

And that is one reason why beauty
is disappearing from our world.

Getting and spending, wrote
Wordsworth, we lay waste our powers.

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.

Like adverts, today's works
of art aim to create a brand,

even if they have no product
to sell except themselves.

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.

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.

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 centre,
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.

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 vandalised.

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.

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.

The result is another kind of failure to
fit, and is there simply to be demolished.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These are timeless moments

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

From the beginning of western
civilisation, poets and philosophers

have seen the experience of
beauty as calling us to the divine.

Plato, writing in Athens in
the 4th 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,

who are 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 of 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.

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.

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.

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.

Plato's theory may seem
quaint to people today,

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

Throughout our civilisation,
poets, storytellers,

painters, priests
and philosophers

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

If you were to just look in the
poetry corner, as to the books by

people who have tried to express
the platonic vision of the erotic.

Let's see where there is.

Thomas Mallory's Mort
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 Worldview.

Cavalcanti, who was the master of
Dante, and Dante himself definitely.

Oh, Spencer, of course.
The fairy queen.

Daffodup Willem, to take
the Welsh version of it all.

The women troubadours.
Christina Rossetti.

I thought you could be a
bit more Victorian about it.

And so it goes on.

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
for him Plato's ideal.

This was beauty to be
contemplated but not possessed.

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.

The beauty of a face is a
symbol of the life expressed in it.

It is flesh becomes 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.

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 2,000 years,

But in the 17th century, the Scientific
Revolution began to sow the seeds of doubt.

The Medieval Church
accepted the ancient view

that the Earth lies at the
centre 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.

This was the
Enlightenment vision.

Which described our world as though there
were 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 emotion.

Chelsea 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
ourselves 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 the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 postmodern culture,

that it is a loveless culture, determined
to portray the human world as unlovable.

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.

Oh, you are men of stones!

Had I your tongues and eyes,

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

She's gone forever.

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.

What about things which are not
tragic, but merely sordid or depraved?

Can art find beauty even here?

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.

Some people describe
Tracy 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.

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.

You say that it is. I say that it is. The
second thing is, the Tate say that 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.

Do you think it's beautiful?
Yeah, I do.

I think it's really beautiful, yeah.
Otherwise I wouldn't have shown 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.

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.

There's nothing wrong
with conceptual art as such.

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

The lawyer can come
up with a beautiful idea.

You know, the
statesman, the medic,

let's cure cancer.
Beautiful idea. But he

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

Conceptual art of course
is entirely word bound.

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

its verbal description.
So you need to just say

half a cow in a tank of
formaldehyde and you've,

you're really all the way there.
The object itself

then can be dumped.
Tracy 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 appalled
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
truck with the enemy.

And they say, I tried
to make a model of a

figure, and I model
led 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 standardised

desecration that passes
for art these days.

It actually is a kind of immorality,
because it is an attempt

to obliterate meaning from
the human form in some way.

Well, it's an attempt to
obliterate knowledge.

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.

The same kind of criticism is aimed
at traditionalists in architecture.

One target is Leon Creer, architect of the
Prince of Wales model town of Poundbury.

Designing modest streets,
laid out in traditional ways,

using the well-tried
and much-loved details

that have served us
down the centuries,

Leoncreer has created
a genuine settlement.

The proportions are
human proportions.

The details are
restful to the eye.

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
long-standing home.

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.

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.

But 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 noise and
distraction and nothing resolves.

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.

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 Marta.

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.

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.

Why don't I just give you bar 18?
OK. Good idea.

And 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 immediately

get the message that
it's a piece of grieving,

wouldn't they? Absolutely.

There could 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 it can delight

and move without people
having to know what it's about.

We learn without the theological apparatus
that there is this thing called suffering,

and that it's the destiny of all of us,
but also is not the end of all of us.

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.

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
to redeem our suffering

is one reason why beauty can be
seen as a substitute for religion.

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.