When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.
Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person’s taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste, or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to.
Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world.
Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.
The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies – socialist politics and modernist art – have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body’s dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.
Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment.
The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Like adverts, today’s works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.
There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.
In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was “kitsch.” Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn’t be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.