Beauty and Desecration (...rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness)

City Journal ^ | Spring 2009 | Roger Scruton

[Blind Eye Jones]

“But I will insist that it is (at best) a poor or misdirected artist who needs interpreters, who needs a Priesthood.”

But you do need a language if there is communication.

[Blind Eye Jones]

If, in the 19th century, God left the picture and all that was left was his footprint -- thanks to science and Nietzsche -- then, to recapture the sublime, to represent what can't be represented (God), you would have to be shocked. This is what modern arts attempts to do: shock you. But not shook you as in fill in what God may have been by looking at his footprint, doing the detective work by looking at the clues. (We do the same with the concept of infinity, another sublime trace or clue that represents something that can't be represented in its totality.) No not that... Modern art shocks you by dipping Jesus in urine and throwing shit at religious art. Monkeys throw shit better than we do and this is not how to retrieve God and/or beauty.