‘Why Beauty Matters’: BBC Documentary

Famous British writer, philosopher, and composer Roger Scruton reaches an above average level of aesthetic clarity here in this inspiring documentary:

Scruton believes that beauty in art does matter and that the modern art of the 20th century has largely lost that beauty.

A BBC documentary from 2009 vividly detailing Scruton’s views on beauty and art is slowly but steadily spreading on the internet.

Scruton states in his introduction: “I think we are losing beauty and with it there is the danger of losing the meaning of life.”

For Scruton, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, it is an objective truth—a classical notion, but one that is completely revolutionary in today’s art marketplace.

Take for example Sotheby’s recent sale of Mark Rothko’s seminal “No.1 (Royal Red and Blue)” for $75 million. The work consists of little more than a few rectangles of coordinated colors. Anyone who is not told the value of such art would find it difficult to identify it with beauty or beauty with any type of dollar value.

As Scruton narrates in his documentary, Why Beauty Matters, “In the 20th century, beauty stopped being important, art increasingly aimed to disturb and break moral taboos, it was not beauty but originality however achieved.”

The realization among artists and non-artists alike is increasingly that the emperor, in this case the art market, is wearing no clothes. Who can really respect an “emperor” who insists his parading, naked body is cloaked in the finest of garments. To the clearheaded, he’s delusional.

“One day the knowledge that the emperor has no clothes will spread, and the market will crash – but only temporarily,” said Scruton in an email interview…

Click here to read the rest of the story on The Epoch Times.

Featured Image: Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” (Wikimedia Commons)

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