Art and Beauty

Roger Scruton has made a thought-provoking documentary on the importance of beauty and art in our everyday lives.

The central argument of Scruton was that art should portray beauty, and that the job of an artist was to see beauty (which exists in everyday life) and share his vision in his art work. Modern art aims to shock, often by putting what is most embarrassing about our everyday life into the limelight because it is real. However, he argues that reminding us of the suffering and utility of real life, important as it may be, is not what an artist should do.

He uses examples like Mantegna’s painting of the crucifixion, Delacroix’s unmade bed and Pergolesi’s music to illustrate that despite their themes of death, mundaneness and suffering, the artist, with skill and creativity, manages to portray beauty. In presenting beauty, the unpleasantries of real life transcends practicalities and in so doing, the art work consoles, inspires, and stimulates the imagination with good taste. In contrast, Emin’s unmade bed merely presents the bed in actuality – it lacks the rich artistic details in Delacroix’s painting, which aims to vividly present the transcendent beauty that struck him on that fateful morning as the morning sunlight fell on his unmade bed.

I found that argument compelling – putting something in a gallery and calling it art doesn’t make it art. Anyone can have a good idea or concept, but it takes an artist to present it beautifully and share the inspiration he received in a fleeting moment. This is captured in elegantly written music and prose, as well as skillfully made paintings and photography.

People often create beautiful pieces that transcends human existence because of their beliefs in the spiritual and divine. Buildings made for religious worship are often the most beautiful architecture and music made to express devotion to the divine is typically elegant – because people believe that the spirtual is sacred and ideal, thereby lacking the ugly woefulness of human existence. But even without those beliefs, he argues that artists can continue to inspire and console by creating art for beauty in itself.

As Kant argues (which the author also mentions), a person is free only if he can make decisions for himself despite his inclinations and physical necessities. The intellectual capabilities of mankind has allowed people to spend less time fulfiling their physical needs, thereby making them free to smell the roses, discover beauty and explore the metaphysical (moralising included). It differentiates us from the mere existence of animals, and provides special meaning in human existence. Besides studying the “why” and “how” of things with science, we create art.

Beautiful works of art portrays human insight. And therefore, depite its complete pointlessness, it is necessary because it shows that we are more than our animalistic needs.