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.

It is easy, and probably true, to talk of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Michelangelo and Mozart as creators of timeless art. It is certainly true that we still appreciate them now, and that that appreciation is not so much dependent on any historical fascination they might hold, but on their intrinsic merits, which speak to us just as powerfully as they ever did—and indeed which invite constant streams of new and inventive interpretations and understandings.

However, it’s also true that this idea of timelessness can all too easily become mythologized and metaphysicised, and their creators nearly deified as a result. Since most of us mere mortals are incapable of properly grasping why exactly it is that they have stood so solidly against the ravages of time, we are inclined to feel that these great artists spend only half their time here on earth, and the other with the gods on Mount Olympus, privy to some higher knowledge always and eternally beyond our reach. We imagine that the spans of time that have tested these works are long. One hundred years, some say, is the amount of time beyond which one can easily say, “this is a classic, and this is not.” But what about in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? Will Shakespeare still be revered then?

It seems likely, if only because even if writers eventually surmount him, that is no reason for his work to be considered of lesser value. Shakespeare superseded Chaucer, but we still read the latter. But what about in millions of years?

An interesting fact about literature that sets it apart from other mediums is that it rests upon a pretty arbitrary foundation stone—language. Almost all classics are considerably weakened in translation. Although there are great translations that rival the originals, it is safe to say that to fully appreciate a great work of literature, you have to read it in the original language. But no language lasts forever. Even though it is likely that English, for instance, will survive a few more centuries, and even if it undergoes less change than it did over the past 1,000 years, it can only survive if the geopolitical situation of the world doesn’t drastically change. It is not even possible to say that that will be the case in a hundred years’ time, let alone a thousand. It may be a cliché to say, but if China continues its rise to world domination, Mandarin may take the place of English as the world’s most spoken language, and English may eventually become a minority and thus become extinct. It may even be replaced with “Panglish”, a variant of English that contains so many international contributions as to be virtually unrecognisable.

You might object, of course, that hardly anyone apart from classical scholars speaks Ancient Greek nowadays, and yet the works of Sophocles still survive, and are still loved. That will probably become the situation with Shakespeare soon enough, as it already is with Chaucer. But we are still relatively close in time to the Ancient Greeks. It is still quite easy to see their cultural influence upon us, and therefore it makes sense that people should want to learn Ancient Greek. But will this still be the case in hundreds of thousands of years? It’s quite possible, but it seems that the further away we get from Ancient Greece, the less likely it will be.

Can we truly say that something is timeless if it rests on such an arbitrary foundation as language? We probably can, but only if we say that language itself is not arbitrary, it is only individual languages that are. Instead of thinking of Shakespeare’s works as he wrote them as the “original Shakespeare”, perhaps it is more useful to think of them as translations of Shakespeare—the best ones available, but translations nonetheless. All writers struggle to formulate the words to best express what they want to say, so in that sense when Shakespeare wrote he was only translating into English the thoughts that he and his characters had.

But there is another, perhaps more serious objection to the idea that a work of literature (or art generally) can be timeless. Our appreciation of art depends on human nature being as it is. But what if it were to change significantly?

This is a question that would undoubtedly baffle even the greatest of evolutionary biologists. Is it even possible to assert that, no matter how much we might change, there may still be some crucial aspects of our nature that will never go? It seems hard to imagine, for instance, that we will become less intelligent. The converse is not true, either: it’s not obvious that we will become so much more intelligent, because we don’t all choose partners solely based on their cognitive faculties. So while it is not obvious that we will become more intelligent, it seems unlikely that we will become less intelligent, and virtually impossible to conceive that we will become so much less intelligent that we are unrecognisable as humans.

Suppose we become considerably more intelligent. Imagine a world where each of us could individually prove the Riemann hypothesis in five minutes at the age of two. Would Shakespeare eventually seem backward? It’s quite possible, but in any case rather difficult for such a backward homo sapiens as myself to contemplate. Some might recoil at the image conjured, and picture a lifeless society where such things as love don’t exist. But there is no logical reason to think so. After all, emotions exist for a very good reason. Indeed, they must be more important to the continuation of human life than intelligence, because even if we were all born with full knowledge and understanding of the fact that we must procreate, from whence would come our inclination to do so?

To imagine that the appreciation of Shakespeare is a solely cognitive task is to wildly swerve from the truth. Shakespeare’s plays are intelligent, but they do not require the mental effort that quantum mechanics asks of us, and in any case there are playwrights like Beckett and Pirandello who are arguably more sophisticated, at least in a non-dramatic, conceptual sort of way, than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s brilliance (as well as that of other writers at his level) is in his insightful portrayals of the lives of people. Even if we become more intelligent, would our lives become significantly different that these portrayals, as insightful as they are, might just become fascinating relics and records of a period in our evolutionary history?

It is, perhaps, impossible to say. For all that we might speculate, there are countless ways that the human species might evolve, and it’s difficult to tell whether any one of them will have a significant effect on our relationship with art. But perhaps it is fair to say that our instinct tells us that we won’t change so dramatically. When we look at our relatives in the animal kingdom, we are fascinated not just by the ever-surprising variety of nature, but also by the similarity to ourselves. For the most part they do not experience the pain and pleasure of their existence like we do, yet there is a sense in which, that one difference aside, their lives are fundamentally the same as our own. So perhaps timeless art is not just timeless for human beings, but for all equivalently intelligent animals? Or perhaps that’s just something that someone in the infancy of his species’ evolution would say.

Be under no illusion. No videogame has reached the near-unassailable heights of King Lear or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. No videogame has come close. But that does not mean that there is no value in taking the matter seriously. Even if we were to conclude that videogames are not art, then that may give us a better understanding of what art is.

To take a typical example of the kind of writing that is produced on the artistic status of videogames, take this controversial article by Jack Kroll, written in 2000. It is almost painful in its one-sidedness and comical in its blindness. His essential thesis can be distilled into the following: “games can be fun and rewarding in many ways, but they can’t transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art. Even the most advanced games lack the shimmering web of nuances that makes human life different from mechanical process.” This is typical of the lazy videogames-are-not-art position. To deny that human complexity is intimately tied to the nature of art would be foolish, but it is equally foolish to opine that emotional complexity is somehow identical to art, which is what Kroll’s statement amounts to. Much better to investigate more fully how exactly emotional complexity is tied to art, and, more specifically, why videogames cannot have this in principle rather than simply observe that no current videogame has it. The counter to this position is simple: if architecture is to be considered art—as most people consider it—then it does not conform to Kroll’s Emotional Complexity Rule, and Kroll happens to differ with the general consensus. If he were to say that the complex interplay of shapes and colours and composition that goes to produce great architecture can be interpreted as emotionally complex on some abstract level, a level which would be very difficult to reduce and explain scientifically, then he would have to concede a similar possibility for videogames.

He goes on to say:

Moviemakers don’t have to simulate human beings; they are right there, to be recorded and orchestrated. The digitally created medieval Japanese warriors in Kessen (one of the first titles made for PlayStation 2) have none of the breathing presence, the epic gallantry, of the knights in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film Ran. The top-heavy titillation of Tomb Raider‘s Lara Croft falls flat next to the face of Sharon Stone, smiling with challenging sensuality at some haplessly macho male in Basic Instinct. Any player who’s moved to tumescence by digibimbo Lara is in big trouble.

Here Kroll makes the all too common mistake of conflating the aesthetics of the visual with the very different aesthetics of videogames. If Kroll seriously thinks that videogame graphics won’t reach a convincing level of realism, then he really is in denial. Granted, the article was written in 2000, but even then the rapid upward trend of graphics was evident for all to see. Furthermore, the “challenging sensuality” of Sharon Stone is due in large part to acting, and not to anything inherent in the medium of film: there is an art to portraying this, just like there is an art to portraying it by chipping away at a block of marble—just like there is an art to portraying it by sculpting a three dimensional model with software. I should think that recreating Sharon Stone’s “challenging sensuality” virtually will soon be seen as an impressive but pretty commonplace achievement.

Many of those who take the view that videogames are art make the same mistake, summoning up visually opulent games and using that as proof that they must be art. It goes without saying that visuals from a game can be as good as any painting—after all, one can simply use a painting in a game. But we would not think a bad play any better if the Mona Lisa were on stage. So the visual quality of a game should not affect in any considerable way the status of videogames generally as art.

Given that it is clearly erroneous to claim that the artfulness of a videogame is the same as the quality of its visuals or brilliance of its music or even depth of its writing, where then lies the art in the videogame? Central to this question is the problem of interactivity, and in what way this adds to or detracts from artistic status.

To enlighten our quest further, we might consider the question, “is chess art?”. I think it likely that most people would say “no”. However, it is easy to see that it does share some qualities with art, namely: individual chess games can be very dramatic, matches are almost always enlightening in some way, and lastly, it makes you think. Granted, not every game is dramatic, but chess at least provides the framework for a near-infinite supply of drama. And granted, as much as it might make you think, it certainly does not make you feel on the same level as a War & Peace does; but if a game can make us think, why can another game not make us feel? The framework of chess is an inherently military-logical one, and as such it would be absurd to expect it to teach us anything about love or jealousy or any of the great themes of art, at least not directly. However, it is not too much of a leap to see that, if the framework of a videogame were sufficiently well thought out, it could indeed teach us about those things. And just as chess has stood the test of time, it is not unthinkable that a videogame should do so too.

But there are problems. And these problems, I think, are unlikely to be solved by anyone other than a genius. One of the most difficult is the seeming arbitrariness of plot in relation to the player. In other words, while in fiction it is perfectly acceptable to believe that a certain character is in love with another, in videogames, given that you are that character, this whole setup seems much less natural. Certainly, no videogame should tell you “your character is in love with so-and-so”. Since you are supposed to be that character, this would seem just as arbitrary as someone telling you the same thing in real life. “Umm, no I’m not”, you’d probably say.

But on the other hand, to give the player complete freedom rips the virtual world of any meaning. If the player has no restrictions, and can do absolutely anything she wants, she will either aimlessly go about doing everything, or be overwhelmed by choice and end up doing nothing. So it is clear that some balance must be struck between enforcing the designer’s vision upon the player and giving the player free reign. Or to put it another way, the balance must be struck between predestination and freedom of will.

Even with the limitations that chess imposes, it is impossible to exhaust its possibilities in thousands of lifetimes. This probably cannot—and should not—be the case with the videogames of the future. Rather, if a videogame is to be so inexhaustible, this should come from the way in which it puts you into the shoes of the “protagonist”, and the multitude of ways in which the player can interpret the nature of the game’s situation. This is true of other fiction, and I cannot see why videogames cannot achieve this, given enough time and thought.

It seems to me unlikely that this will be achieved for quite some time, though. At the moment it’s quite a vague and abstract design philosophy, and as such difficult to know how to implement. But perhaps more importantly, the videogame world suffers from an immense inferiority complex which may be difficult to overcome.  One 17-year-old who was mortally offended by Jack Kroll’s article wrote that, “for every typical shoot-’em-up game there are just as many games full of characters more complex than Shakespeare’s and plot twists more wrenching than Clancy’s.” There are no videogame characters as complex as Shakespeare’s, of course. But if this is the view taken by the game designers of the future, we may have to wait a very long time for videogames and Shakespeare to be meaningfully uttered in the same sentence.