In response to, Luke O’Sullivan: Cultural conservatives have lost their way. That is why their art forms are weak, PerplexedSardine wrote:
There is an echo in this article of what Roger Scruton has been saying for many years: That aesthetics prior to the 20th century built upon what had come before, which (counter-intuitively to a modern artist) resulted in more truly “original” work. It celebrated history, tradition, religion and beauty.
In modern art, the highest praise is not that something is beautiful but only that it is original, “transgressive” being the current popular description. Modern art thus ends up floating free of any established understanding of beauty and becomes whatever fever dream the artist can produce. Oddly enough, this leads to most “transgressive” art looking alike. In Scruton’s own words, we have been producing Duchamp’s urinal ever since. I’d recommend Scruton to interested aesthetes.
