Why Beauty Matters
Author, Roger Scruton
In 2009, English philosopher Roger Scruton produced a documentary entitled Why Beauty Matters, available online for free. Therein, he argues that artists traditionally created their artifacts in the service of Beauty, which was a universal and objective value as crucial as Truth or Goodness. Everyone knew that the natural state of human affairs was, as Thomas Hobbes poignantly described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but the beauty found in art provided a salve for these existential nightmares; it brought “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy.” To make something beautiful was to cast a decisive vote affirming life’s value, dignity, and worth, despite its horrors. In order for artists to effect this transformation in their viewers, they had to use creativity to invite them to see the world in a new light — to see it as a home and not a prison.
As Scruton points out, modern art rejects both this philosophical justification for art and the methodological assumptions it implies. The point of modern art is not to inspire, but to disturb; its chief characteristic is originality, no matter the creative compromises required to achieve it. Modern artists think that art has no business trying to redeem randomness; they wish to rub their viewers’ noses in that untransformed chaos. It’s a sort of dogmatic contemporaneity: art that instructs the viewer that there is only this moment, and life will only ever be like this.
When art is divorced from its traditional function, he argues, the only remaining value is utility. The modernist dictum “form follows function” encapsulates the rule. The proper aim of architects, designers, engineers, sculptors, and painters is not to transform reality, but to produce whatever works. A society predicated on consumption cannot help but put utility first because the efficiencies of mass reproduction are the only way to maintain the ceaseless drip of cheaper goods. Consumer societies put usefulness first — beauty be damned.
But a paradox emerges when an artist (or even the entire art community) adopts this impoverishing philosophy. If you only consider utility, the things you build or create will soon become useless as context changes, and their function no longer serves the present moment. Conversely, if you put beauty first and create in order to make things beautiful, whatever one produces will become useful forever because humans will always need to have their imaginations fired. Fake art abnegates its responsibility to transform reality; its only function is to replicate ugliness, brokenness, depravity, or meaninglessness. Modern art, Scruton observes, wallows in self-disgust under the guise of realism; modern architecture marries the cult of utility with the cult of ugliness, so its practitioners produce buildings that look like this. Postmodern architecture doubles down on this posture; it greets life’s randomness, chaos, and suffering with an ironic grin instead of a pained grimace.
At the abbey, we want to reverse this trend. We want to build buildings and patronize artists who create and cultivate transformed reality out of life’s brokenness and absurdity. For this dream to materialize, we must commit to beauty as a governing motivation and a deep allegiance. We must adorn and cultivate our property in ways that reflect its created glory and its inherent worth as a place worth redeeming. We must refuse to surrender to the tyranny of utility, functionality, productivity, or pragmatism, even as we take those needs seriously. We must build things well, with materials that will last, designed according to aesthetic principles that elevate the human spirit and transform our land into a home where people find rest, consolation, and peace.
