It is honorable to consider art as vital for the nurturing of the soul and not to confuse it with utilitarian needs. Roger Scruton argues in the documentary Why Beauty Matters (2009) that if everything were intended just to serve some specific purpose, then eventually each thing will lose its specified purpose. If a thing is made to be beautiful – to carry some significance other than its direct use – then people will want to use it, and it will likely remain useful for a longer time.
Consider the lifeless buildings on a degraded city street: the buildings usually have no significance other than the offices they used to contain but have since been abandoned and stand empty, with windows broken and boarded amid delighted rodents. No one cared enough for these buildings because they were ugly from the time they were built. Compare this to the castles of Europe or the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome. These classic, beautiful buildings have lasted hundreds of years because they are so beautiful that no one can stand watching them fall apart. Even when one person sells a beautiful building or boards its windows, someone else eventually salvages it and finds a new purpose for it – a museum, for example. Even when they fall into ruin, their ruins are honored.
Perhaps the greatest difference between “old” buildings and modern buildings – between “old” art and modern, subjective art – is the focus: old art revolved around beauty while modern art revolves around individual use and the ways in which the artists perceive themselves. Old artists displayed the whole picture. They conveyed emotion through the complete context of a painting, the harmonic chords in a music piece, the order in a well-written poem, or the connection between dancers on stage. Painters used the contrast of light and dark colors to depict saintly characters or evil characters and shadows hid sorrowful faces while light highlighted happy ones, as seen in Rembrandt’s portraits. The inclusion or exclusion of certain objects signified and communicated a distinct message.
For example, the lack of a happy sleeping person in Eugene Delacroix’s “Un Lit Defait” is significant, for Delacroix’s painting clearly depicts a restless and worrisome emotion by depicting an unmade bed in a dark room with the covers tossed about in disorder. Delacroix transformed his restless ideas into a painting to depict the same emotions while still creating beauty.
Unlike Delacroix, modern advertising does not aim for expression but for utility. So many modern advertisers try to sell various products to the elderly, implying that those who are older may become beautiful and youthful again through the use of their precious products–whether wrinkle cream, makeup, or pills. Scruton reminds us of Rembrandt, who found beauty even in aged faces:
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.
There is beauty in any human face. This is the most individual and vulnerable thing we all have. There is a certain innocence about our faces that we often do not realize. So often, we lie with the expressions on our faces; they also speak more than our words often can and such beauty and simplicity can bring “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy,” as Scruton says. There is truth in beauty that inspires virtue.
But modern art has rejected this beauty for the utility and individuality. Scruton determined that the newfound vulgarity in modern art revolves around the artist’s personal story, whether it be honorable or demonic. Originality has become more important than alignment with a larger truh, and as a result, manners and modesty have lost their value and are regarded as old-fashioned, strict, and solely for traditional folk.
The modest lifestyle, as such, has disappeared along with respect for beauty in art. Scruton reasons that art seeks to depict the world as it actually exists, but in the confusion of modernity, art has become confusing and disturbing, as well. He explains, “Sometimes the intent is to shock us, but what is shocking the first time around, is boring and vacuous when repeated.” Scruton particularly criticized Duchamp for displaying a vulgar object and considering it “art” as a satirical way of frowning on the traditional pride that generally accompanied old art and wanting to remove art from the world. Scruton points to this very “artist” for contributing to the degradation of art by claiming that art should be considered art not based on whether it is beautiful or not, but based on whether the artist considers it art. Likewise, consider Tracey Emin’s My Bed, an unmade bed nestled in a large pile of old garbage. While Emin may consider it art – and while the bed may depict despair, depression, and great sorrow–it is not art. It does not inspire goodness, and it is not inspired by goodness. It glorifies Emin’s own lifestyle of darkness without a notion of repentance. Such art furthers the darkness of the soul rather than cultivating change or providing solace. Art should turn the face of the soul to the honorable; the work of art should be like a mirror lying in a dark hole that reflects the incoming sunlight and alters the atmosphere of the room.
These attitudes continue in marketing and media today. In the attempt to sell, modern advertisers encourage products to make the old beautiful or to hide true age, implying that only the young are beautiful or that ugliness grows with age. Modern advertisers also sell products to young men and women that capitalize on the vulgarity of immodesty, just as Emin’s My Bed does. Yet the ancients honored the elderly for their wisdom and experience and the modest for their purity and simplicity. They remembered that the goal of beauty is to turn a person’s soul toward God—to cause a reflection on the self in humility and acceptance of a necessary change in repentance. While modernity molds art to the subjective and glorifies vulgarity while disregarding virtue, the ancients honored the change and growth of a soul in service to its Creator. Scruton’s work warns us that we have lost truth in beauty and beauty in truth.
