Why beauty matters

Watching Roger Scruton on BBC2:

Philosopher Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives.

In the 20th century, Scruton argues, art, architecture and music turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual desert.

Using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart, Scruton analyses where art went wrong and presents his own impassioned case for restoring beauty to its traditional position at the centre of our civilisation.

BBC2 28/11/09

Some notes from the prog below. Seems to me he's missing the point that an idea can be beautiful (though Alexandar Stoddart - who Scruton approves of - says precisely that), and there is beauty in understanding something. If an 'ugly' work of art helps us understand the world better, that is beauty, surely?

I do have sympathy with his comments on architecture, though.

Someone else "Enables people to see the world they live in in a different way"

Scruton: "To see the ideal in the every day, to transfigure it."

Scruton: "We need useless things [like beauty] as much as useful"

(Oscar Wilde: All art is absolutely useless)

"Beauty is assailed from two sides: the cult of ugliness; and the cult of utility"

"The greatest crime against the beauty the world has yet seen. The crime of modern architecture"

"If you consider only utility, soon the things you will build will be useless" (Example of Reading town centre)

Beauty is to fill the God-shaped hole created by the loss of religion.

Moments we understand as sacred - experience of being in love, the presence of a dead body.

"A denial of love" "determined to portray the world as un loveable"

"There is all the difference in the world by something which aims to transform the everyday, and something which just shares the untidiness of the everyday"

Alexander Stoddart. People in any sphere, such as lawyers and politicians, can have a beautiful idea but it isn't art. Conceptual art is completed in the descrption "a calf cut in half and put in formaldehyde" - you don't need to actually see it.

My emphasis - precisely, so likewise conceptual art can be beautiful.