Beauty, like morals, occupy no small place in the universe. Beauty is critical and for only one reason, which is that it points to God. No God? No motive for beauty.

Still, Scruton steps on the baby in defense of higher things. If you ask me what the kernel of art is, I'd say innovation. That means creation, which also points to God. The new thing. If an artist is motivated by hate, or depravity, then please go ahead and paint that. Isn't freedom also the outwork of an ordered universe? Certainly.

My take-away (as ham-handed as it is) is that the post-moderne indictment of beauty was wrong and overbearing,. People sense that. Bring back beauty, but don't trample on the elemental parts of creativity, which include generation and expression.

Sorry, Gerard. Serious internet hiccups these days.

Hence my life-long annoyance and despair at the ubiquity of rock "music."

The preamble at the link is worth the price of admission.

"Beauty: A Short Introduction", by Roger Scruton
http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Roger-Scruton/dp/019955952X/

And so we reap the whirlwind of radical materialism.

Art and music have a core set of values that are expressed with words like nice, beautiful, pleasant, soothing, something that says "it is good".
Those values are constant, not changed with the passing of time. A woman, a flower, a bridge, whatever the subject the feeling provoked is "ahh, nice".

Art and music can also be described with more temporal values like shocking, scary, jarring, obscene, profane.
The artists are using the canvas to express secondary feelings of outrage, indignation, scorn, usually negative and temporal, almost always and purposely opposed to the core values of beauty.

Art and music that ascribe to the core values endure centuries.
Art and music used to convey a message endure um, maybe a couple years.

Exactly, Chas. Which is more likely to be sold out? A performance of J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, or a concert of some modern "composer" that sounds like a baby playing with pots and pans? No prizes for the right answer, we all know which one it is. Everyone does, even those fooling themselves about how "edgy" the modern hack's "music" is.

John Muir wrote an opinion, or repeated one for all I know, which has shaped my imagination about the relationship of earth and heaven: That which is excellent remains forever a part of this universe.

So heaven is perfect understanding, but the universe is never complete, never can be complete; it collects great beauty as it goes. Beauty is formed in adversity, and earth is adversity, the crock pot of invention. Beauty is not only great art in all it's forms, but great love; and great love is that which admits to sacrifice. Whatever of it is excellent then becomes part of the universe.

As to the twentieth century and modernity, we did not notice that greatness is only ever formed in inequality because we now worship at the altar of equality seven days a week.

Since we cannot obtain greatness, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it--
Montaigne

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