Scruton v Januszczak, and the nature of beauty

Diplomatic relations between the camps of Waldemar Januszczak and Roger Scruton are especially hostile. The BBC’s Modern Beauty season has recently been the stage for a pitched battle between the two, and the debate has spilled over into other mediums, too. Each presents his own views on beauty and art in an impassioned way, occasionally descending into ad hominem, and naturally coming no closer to a resolution on the matter at hand.

Januszczak’s central point is that modern art can be beautiful, and that its beauty is of a unique kind, which encourages us to look afresh at the mundanity around us, and see it for what it really is. To support this view, he fondly quotes the famous words of Confucius that everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it. He is tired of all the stuffy, conservative types who argue that modern art is ugly, and goes on to show that, in essence, what they are doing is nothing new. Ugliness has always been a fascination of artists, and in shining a particular kind of light on things that are considered to be ugly, they can be shown to be beautiful. He cites Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, which he would have us believe is the precursor to Damien Hirst’s work, and another of dead fish at a marketplace by Frans Snyders, which prompts disproportionate fascination in finding a good approximation of the number of fish populating it. These paintings, rather than shallowly portraying death, are in fact profound insights into death, and remind us of how inescapable and thus central a part it is of human life. Thus, he concludes, what those artists, as well as the Damien Hirsts of our day, are doing, is shining a light on an ugly thing to do something profound, and in so doing, make it beautiful.

Rembrandt: precursor of Hirst?

Hirst: influenced by Rembrandt?

Scruton is having none of this. He argues, on the contrary, that our modern artists and architects have joined a perverse cult of ugliness which holds that not only is beauty not an end of art, but also that it is old-fashioned and belongs to a time before the atrocities of the 20th century, when we all had a much rosier view of things. Combined with this perversity, he says, is the notion which has become prevalent since the Enlightenment that art should be original, and thus owe less of a debt to nature. But nature, Scruton argues, is the ultimate source of beauty, so we ignore its guiding path at our peril. Beauty is so essential to our well-being that, without it, our lives cannot be considered full and healthy.

The two men disagree fundamentally nearly everywhere, except in two revealing areas. First, they both agree that art must be beautiful, it is just that they have different notions of what this entails. Second, they agree that “ugliness” can be beautiful, but this very notion is so slippery (as is that of beauty in general) that even in saying this, they probably mean very different things. Januszczak shows us an ordinary photograph of his mother which he carries in his wallet at all times. In a moving interlude, he tells us how even though she is not formally beautiful, nevertheless the photograph holds great meaning for him, and so for him it is profoundly beautiful. Scruton’s concept of ugliness being beautiful is not so much an ugly object or person, but rather an ugly idea. And here is a small but telling crossover: he shows us a painting by Mantegna which depicts an ugly moment—the crucifixion of Christ—very beautifully, and in so doing transforms it and gives it meaning. So for both men the connection between beauty and meaning, though never expressed in any exact terms, is an important one, and we get the sense that they believe the two ideas somehow inextricable. A beautiful rose might in itself be meaningless; yet there is some inexpressible way in which we can perceive it to be full of meaning.

Januszczak’s understanding of “beautiful ugliness” seems to be fatally flawed. He maintains, as Confucius does, that beauty is everywhere, and that it takes an effort on our part to spot it, but this leaves him open to a rather obvious criticism: if that’s true, then why are we not all artists? If the burden of spotting beauty is solely on the viewer’s shoulders, then why do we still have the artist, who in this universe is relegated only to the middleman, or at best to a philosopher of aesthetics, who propounds theories about what is beautiful, but scarcely creates it? Indeed, why do we still need art, if we only require art critics to point out beauty? He might argue that the artists he admires are especially talented in excavating beauty from the unlikeliest of places. In that case, everything is beautiful, but some things must be more beautiful than others, and we are back to where we started. If we accept that Tracey Emin’s bed is beautiful, then what justification is there for not finding anything else I might think of as beautiful too? In trying to justify the art critic’s trade to the people, he ends up showing how defunct it must be.

The problem with Scruton’s position is that he sets himself up as too obviously caricaturable to be taken fully seriously. The reason for this is understandable: he feels that western civilization is under attack, and that if something is not done about it soon, if need be by himself, then it will be only ruins, and no evidence of its past greatness will remain. Therefore he defends this notion of artistic tradition, and may accidentally place too much emphasis on its importance. It is true that contemporary art, having concluded that art as a whole has exhausted its resources in the “traditional” aim of producing beauty, has created a cult of originality, which worships not Originality itself, but a mere impostor. That, however, should never make us prefer tradition over true originality.

There is a famous passage in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in which Polixenes and Perdita argue about the distinction between art and nature. Polixenes says:

Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scion to the wildest stock;

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art

Which does mend nature, change it rather: but

The art itself is nature.

Polixenes’ point (and, we surmise, by extension Shakespeare’s) is that art and nature are not so obviously separable as at first it seems. The art “does mend nature”, but the very act of creating art is a part of nature, and so nothing that you create should be thought of as separate from nature. The natural extension to this view is that we should not treat nature as something so perfect and unchangeable, because it is inclined to change by its very nature.

To those who are ambivalent about contemporary art, Januszczak’s characterisation of their kind as stuffy and conservative can only rile them. And this is not a good thing for the dialogue: they, newly embittered, will indeed become conservative, and unable to distinguish between conservatism and good, sober judgement. And those who are unambiguously in favour of the Emins and Hirsts of this world will romanticise their position by claiming that what defines it is its anti-conservatism, and nothing deeper than that. Although it is undoubtedly true that the sort of experimentalism that goes on in contemporary art should not be applied so brusquely to architecture—we don’t, after all, have to see art every day—yet Scruton is wrong to think of all modern art as being nihilistic and ugly. Scruton should try to think of the longer game. Civilization is not so fragile that a few generations will wipe it out entirely. It may be unfortunate for him that he lives in this age, but there could be a positive outcome to the art movement of today. Soon enough, artists will fall out of love with the mode of representation that’s in fashion, and we will see a more mature version of what is happening. Most of today’s art will not stand the test of time, but it may very well lead to a newfound sophistication that we were unable to anticipate before.