Does Beauty Matter? part II

Have peo­ple lost their faith in beauty?

Scru­ton explores  the change brought on by Deuchant, Koontz et. al. and how that change attempted to give  mean­ing to “a here and now” world as opposed to an ide­al­ized one. Scru­ton main­tains that art is really about cre­ativ­ity which is a call to oth­ers to see the world the way the artist sees it.

He ques­tions whether peo­ple have lost their faith in beauty because they have lost their faith in ideals. Repla­ce­ing these loses with util­ity. He argues in favor of a strong place for beauty in our lives because it helps rein­force human nature. Which I would say pre­sup­poses cer­tain assump­tions about human nature.

I would also have to agree that a key issue to help­ing artists make a liv­ing from their work is chang­ing the way art is seen by soci­ety, chang­ing the view from com­mod­ity back to a cre­ative vision pre­sented by the artist to the world.

Talk­ing Points:

• If cre­ativ­ity is a call for oth­ers to see the world the way the artist sees it, then what does that say about artists show­ing us their vision of the here and now?
• Does their vision count or should it be dis­counted because it repulses some?
• Doesn’t this really illus­trate the effect art/creativity has on soci­ety when we com­pare the vision to the chang­ing val­ues of society?
• Has this change been ini­ti­ated and fed by the con­tem­po­rary vision of artists?