Last September, I had a debate with Brian Rowan in the comments of one of my blog posts. The debate was about music: whether you can say, for example, that Stravinsky is better than James Blunt. I said yes, you can, and Brian said no, you can’t. Well, I saw this article in the American Spectator a few days ago, by Roger Scruton, an interesting thinker who has appeared on this blog twice before. It’s mainly about visual art rather than music, but I believe the argument stands for any kind of art. He says it so much better than I do. Here’s an excerpt:
Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with the untutored opinion of their incoming students, that there is no such thing as a distinction between good and bad taste. But imagine someone saying the same thing about humor. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday recount one of the few recorded occasions when the young Mao Tse-tung burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death. Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others’ misfortunes. What would that world have in common with the world of Moliere’s Tartuffe, of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? Nothing, save the fact of laughter. It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsement in humor, in which one whole aspect of the human spirit would have become stunted and grotesque.
Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in Brillo boxes, in signed urinals, in crucifixes pickled in urine, or in objects similarly lifted from the debris of ordinary life and put on display with some kind of satirical intention — in other words, the increasingly standard fare of official modern art shows in Europe and America. What would such a world have in common with that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even Cézanne? Of course, there would be the fact of putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a degenerate world, a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the ideal and the transcendent, but in which we study human debris in place of the human soul. It would be a world in which one whole aspect of the human spirit — the aesthetic — would have become stunted and grotesque.
(Read the full article to see this in context)
But I do have reservations. I also know that Scruton is a self-professed conservative, who sees twentieth century modernism as a destructive movement tied up with socialism, the enemy of common sense and decency (see his brilliant After Modernism). In the exerpt above it’s revealing that he says “even Cézanne.” So while Cézanne might sometimes be called the father of modernism, he escapes damnation. But only just.
UPDATE: Check out Scruton’s book on beauty, of which the quoted article was just a taster.