Tag Archives: Roger Scruton

Ravels in Review Friday

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It’s been a long time since I did a Ravels in Review post between my trip to Costa Rica and skipping last week because there was very little that needed to be summed up. It’s so nice to be swinging these art ravels in full force, you won’t even here me rail on the weather. Especially as it is supposed to be a fantastic 71 degrees in NYC today.

But as to these past ravels, you’ll see we have some interesting debates raised as to beauty, what it is and whether society values it, tales of rapscallions both old and new, a review of MoMA’s photography exhibition Into the Sunset, and we even poked our nose across the pond to check out happenings at the Louvre and the situation for art recovery in L’Aquila.
Whew–time to take a breath. I also am excited by the idea of a public cafe cum art studio. So read, enjoy, comment: I always like to hear from people.

If you’re wondering why I’ve said so little about Costa Rica, it’s not that it was a cultural black hole per se. Watching a soccer match between Costa Rica and Mexico proved to be quite the cultural experience, and Costa Rica possesses great natural beauty. Not to mention surfing, zip lining, sloths (like the cute one above), toucans and tons of monkeys. It makes for a wonderful vacation, just not so artsy.



I surfed! (the smallest waves). Anyhow, happy Friday to you all! Enjoy the warm weekend!

For or Against: Britain’s beauty

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Britain recently hosted a debate that has gotten a lot of airtime across the pond, debating the statement ‘Britain has become indifferent to beauty.’ With the exception of multiple references to the (British) National Trust and some purely English rhetoric, it’s a debate that would feel equally at home on these shores. If Americans were to have a national debate on the topic of beauty, that is…

The Guardian lays out the respective positions with 4 short essays from some avid, diametrically opposed bastions of culture. That’s my kind of journalism: argumentative, honestly biased, and a tad mocking. Stephen Bailey goes right for the jugular in the opening article with an ad hominen attack, “Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, [my opponents] see no value in contemporary life. Nothing to them is so howlingly funny as poor people going shopping in Tesco.” And it gets better from there.

Check it out, and find out the similarities between Botticelli’s Venus and a Kate Moss ad. Oh, and the coldly intellectual beauty of Roger Scruton makes an appearance as well.

That Intellectual Kind of Beauty

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Beauty is instantly recognizable. What is a little more difficult is to pin down exactly what beauty is. Even is you missed the debate regarding Theodore Dalrymple’s Beauty and the Best, you still have a chance to get into the latest aesthetic theories by checking out the prolific writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in a book entitled, properly, Beauty.

Beauty as Scruton means it is of a specifically mental rather than visceral nature. Along with Sebastian Smee of The Guardian, I rather think Scruton does an injustice when he relegates beauty to an act of rational contemplation. Like every other book on beauty, it deals with whether we can make value judgements about art, i.e. can something be better or more beautiful, than another. He also considers whether art can be moral, rather an old-fashioned question but then so is the question of beauty.
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What kills me about books like this is they tackle a huge and general subject, and then meander bombastically about for 100 pages. Dalrymple’s article made his argument precisely, even without him repositing Kant.
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The best primer for any discussion of beauty, as far as I’m concerned, remains Umberto Eco’s On Beauty, which, with it’s thickly illustrated pages, is a thing of beauty itself. Scruton either ripped off Eco’s jacket cover, or Renaissance woman remain the ideal of beauty…