One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Roger ScrutonRead
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.
Interpretation
This quote expresses skepticism about the conventional notions of beauty in art, suggesting that they are deemed outdated or overly sentimental.
Roger Scruton critiques the current perspective among some artists and critics who regard beauty as an obsolete concept in art. He argues that traditional forms of beauty, once celebrated, are now dismissed as unrefined or overly simplistic, leading to a broader discourse about what constitutes true artistic value and the role of aesthetic experiences in culture.
In practice
During a lecture on modern art, you could use this quote to illustrate how perspectives on beauty have shifted.
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Black storytelling can be about anything, absolutely anything, and within that it can be as enriching, as complex, beautiful, ugly as anything else. We are not seeing enough of those complexities on our stages.
There's no way that music could ever go down the tubes. I can't imagine a civilization without music. When you realize today that music is such a part of people's lives. And will always be, really.
When I'm dancing, I'm not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself. My soul dances with the angels, and my body dances with my wife.
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