Relief

I was worried for a moment there: Roger Scruton's Beauty seemed, on first sight, to make my arguments. Yes, there is such a thing as beauty; yes, we do live in an age in which it is not only undervalued but often intentionally avoided (or even abused); yes, much of the pleasure in modern design is pretended. All true.

But his argument then switfly turns to crap because Scruton is not enough of a connoisseur of art to know why he likes what he likes. (A true connoisseur is only as good as the sum total of what he has seen). Scruton, it turns out, simply dislikes abstract (ie. non-figurative) painting and atonal music. The first view is probably uninformed: I cannot believe Scruton, if he looked carefully enough, would dislike Persian arabesques, for example, with their grace, balance, and delicious, rich color; or the equally abstract and Moroccan tiles. I guess that he really dislikes abstract western art for the same reason for which I dislike it: because it is dull-colored, has rough, unifinished surfaces, has been executed with speed suggesting carelessness, is almost always way too big, and nearly always lacks grace; but Scruton misinterprets his dislike, and attributes it to some imagined dislike for abstractness per se, because, well -- most likely because he is a scholar and a philosopher, which means he has not had enough time to make a study of his own likes and dislikes. He has simply not seen enoough abstract painting to know.

His opinion of music is even more embarassingly ingnorant: Stockhausen, whom he pans, is a decent composer, certainly better than Elvis Presley, whom he somewhat sheepishly admits to liking. Scruton's opinions of music, in other words, like those of most of us, are certified ignoramus. I imagine he'd probably like Bruckner's motets, and Mendelssohn's Seven Last Words; though in their case, he would not know enough to be embarassed about publicly pronouncing so. Or perhaps he would not actually like them, but he'd feel constrained by his own theory to pretend that he does and thereby show himself no better than those he criticizes.