Original subtitles

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked educated people to describe the

aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied, beauty.

And if you had asked for the point of that,

you would have learned that beauty is a value,

as important as truth and goodness..

Then, in the 20th century, beauty stopped being important..

Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos.

It was not beauty, but originality,

however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes.

Not only has art made a cult of ugliness,

architecture, too, has become soulless and sterile.

And it's not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly.

Our language, our music, and our manners are increasingly raucous,

self-centered, and offensive, as though beauty

and good taste have no real place in our lives.

One word is written large on all these ugly things, and that word is me.

My profits, my desires, my pleasures.

And art has nothing to say in response to this, except, yeah, go for it.

I think we are losing beauty, and there is a danger

that with it we will lose the meaning of life.

I'm Roger Scruton, philosopher and writer.

My trade is to ask questions.

During the last few years, I have been asking questions about beauty.

Beauty has been central to our civilization for over 2000 years.

From its beginnings in ancient Greece, philosophy has reflected on the

place of beauty in art, poetry, music, architecture and everyday life.

Philosophers have argued that through the

pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as a home.

We also come to understand our own nature as spiritual beings.

But our world has turned its back on beauty.

And because of that, we find ourselves surrounded by ugliness and alienation.

I want to persuade you that beauty matters.

That 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.

I want to show you the path out of that desert.

And is a path that leads to home.

The great artists of the past

were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering.

But they had a remedy for this, and the name of that remedy was beauty.

The beautiful work of art brings consolation

in sorrow and affirmation in joy.

It shows human life to be worthwhile.

Many modern artists have become weary of this sacred task.

The randomness of modern life, they think,

could not be redeemed by art.

Instead, it should be displayed.

The pattern was set nearly a century ago

by the French artist Marcel Duchamp,

who signed a urinal with a fictitious signature,

R-Mut, and entered it for an exhibition.

His gesture was satirical, designed to mock the world of art

and the snobberies that go with it.

But it has been interpreted in another way,

as showing that anything can be art.

Like a light going on and off.

A can of excrement.

Or even a pile of bricks.

No longer does art have a sacred status.

No longer does it raise us to a higher moral or spiritual plane.

It is just one human gesture among others.

No more meaningful than a laugh or a shout.

I think they're making fun of us.

It's a pile of bricks.

Art once made a cult of beauty.

Now we have a cult of ugliness instead.

Since the world is disturbing, art should be disturbing too.

Those who look for beauty in art are just out of touch with modern realities.

Sometimes the intention is to shock us.

But what is shocking first time round is boring and vacuous when repeated.

This makes art into an elaborate joke,

though one that by now has ceased to be funny.

Yet the critics go on endorsing it,

afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Creative art is not achieved just like that, simply by having an idea.

Of course, ideas can be interesting and amusing,

but this doesn't justify the appropriation of the label art.

If a work of art is nothing more than an idea,

anybody can be an artist, and any object can be a work of art.

There is no longer any need for skill, taste or creativity.

What you were also attempting to do, as I understand it,

was to devalue the art as an object simply by saying,

if I say it's a work of art, that makes it a work of art.

Yeah, but the word work of art, you see, is not so important for me.

I don't care about the word art because it's been so...

you know, discredited and so forth.

But you, in fact, contributed to the

discrediting, didn't you, quite deliberately?

Deliberately, yes. So I really want to get rid of it,

because the way many people today have done away with religion.

People accepted Duchamp at his own valuation.

I think he did not get rid of art, he just got rid of creativity.

However, Duchamp's works are still influencing the course of art today.

Artist Michael Craig-Martin, who taught several of the young British artists

whose work dominates the art world,

followed Duchamp's example with his own seminal work called An Oak Tree.

This consists of a glass of water on a shelf

with a text explaining why it is an oak tree.

When I first entered St Peter's and confronted Michelangelo's Pietà,

For me, that was a transporting experience.

My life was changed by this.

Do you think that someone could have the same experience

with Duchamp's urinal or perhaps with your oak tree,

which is, after all, a similar thing?

I know that when I was a teenager and I first came upon Duchamp

and I first came upon the Ready Maids,

I was absolutely stunned and amazement.

I don't think people are overwhelmed by a sense of beauty when they see the urinal.

It's not meant to be beautiful.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't something

about it that doesn't captivate the imagination.

And I think captivate the imagination is the key to what artwork seeks to do.

Duchamp felt that art had become too interested in techniques,

too interested in optics.

He felt that it had become intellectually and morally corrupt.

Now, his reason for making an artwork that didn't fit the system

was not cynicism. It was in order to say,

I'm trying to make an art that denies all of the things

that people say art should have.

Because I'm trying to say that the central question of art rests somewhere else.

I take the point that things had to change,

and Duchamp was trying to change them,

but what was he trying to change them to?

Well, he could never, in his wildest dreams,

have imagined that what would happen would happen,

or that he himself, I'm sure he had no idea how central...

The thing was that he had stumbled upon, that he had come upon.

Essentially that work of art is a work of art because we think of it as such.

I also think it's important to say that the notion of beauty has been extended

to include things that would not have been thought of.

That's part of the artist's function, is to make beautiful,

make one see something as beautiful,

something that nobody thought was beautiful up until now.

Right, a can of shit.

Well, I'm not sure that it's beautiful,

but if you take an example that's not trying to be beautiful,

if you take, say, Jeff Koons,

Jeff Koons has done some things which are truly astoundingly beautiful.

It's like so much kitsch to me, but kitsch with sugar on.

This is the subject matter of his work, not the substance of his work.

What is the use of this art? What does it help people to do?

I think, hopefully, it allows people to see the world in which they are living in a way

that gives it more meaning to them.

And it's not the world of an ideal world, of some other world, some better place, but

of the here and now, of the world that they're

in and of trying to live more at ease within

the world that they're given.

So the art of today shows us the world as it

is, the here and now and all its imperfections.

But is the result really art?

Surely something is not a work of art just

because it offers a slice of reality, ugliness

included and calls itself art?

Art needs creativity and creativity is about

sharing. It is a call to others to see the

world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naive art of children.

Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images,

nor are they wallowing in ugliness.

They're trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel.

Something of the child's pure delight in creation

survives in every true work of art.

But creativity is not enough and the skill of the true artist is

to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.

This is what Michelangelo achieves in his great portrayal of David.

But when we encounter a concrete cast of the David, perhaps as

part of some garden arrangement, it is not beautiful at all.

For it lacks the essential ingredient of creativity.

Discussions of the kind I have been having are dangerous.

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.

But this doesn't help anybody.

There are standards of beauty which have a firm base in human nature,

and we need to look for them and build them into our lives.

Maybe people have lost their faith in beauty

because they have lost their belief in ideals.

All there is, they are tempted to think, is the world of appetite.

There are no values other than utilitarian ones.

Something has a value if it has a use.

And what's the use of beauty?

All art is absolutely useless, wrote Oscar Wilde,

who intended his remark as praise,

For wild, beauty was a value higher than usefulness.

People need useless things just as much as

even more than they need things for their use.

Just think of it. What is the use of love, of friendship, of worship?

None whatsoever. And the same goes for beauty.

Our consumer society puts usefulness first,

and beauty is no better than a side effect.

Since art is useless, it doesn't matter what you read,

what you look at, what you listen to. I see you, baby.

Shaking that ass. Shaking that ass.

We are besieged by messages on every side,

titillated, tempted by appetite, never at rest.

And that is one reason why beauty is disappearing from our world.

Getting and spending, wrote Wordsworth, we lay waste our powers.

In our culture today, the advert is more important than the work of art,

and artworks often try to capture our attention as adverts do

by being brash or outrageous, like this bejeweled platinum skull by Damien Hirst.

Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand,

even if they have no product to sell except themselves.

Beauty is assailed from two directions,

by the cult of ugliness in the arts

and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

These two cults come together in the world of modern architecture.

At the turn of the 20th century, architects, like artists,

began to be impatient with beauty and to put utility in its place.

The American architect, Louis Sullivan, expressed the credo of the modernists

when he said that form follows function.

In other words, stop thinking about the way a building looks

and think instead about what it does.

Sullivan's doctrine has been used to justify the greatest crime against beauty

that the world has yet seen, and that is the crime of modern architecture.

I grew up near Reading, which was a charming

Victorian town, with terraced streets and

Gothic churches, crowned by elegant public

buildings and smart hotels. But in the 1960s,

things began to change.

Here, in the centre, the homely streets were

demolished to make way for office blocks,

a bus station and car parks, all designed without consideration for beauty.

And the result proves as clearly as can be that if you consider only utility,

the things you build will soon be useless.

This building is boarded up because nobody has a use for it.

Nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it.

Nobody wants to be in it because the thing is so damned ugly.

Everywhere you turn, there is ugliness and mutilation.

The offices and bus station have been abandoned.

The only things at home here are the pigeons fouling the pavements.

Everything has been vandalised.

But we shouldn't blame the vandals.

This place was built by vandals,

and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.

Most of our towns and cities have areas like this.

In which buildings erected merely for their utility

have rapidly become useless,

not that architects learned from the disaster.

When the public began to react against the

brutal concrete style of the 1960s, architects

simply replaced it with a new kind of junk.

Glass walls hung on steel frames with absurd details that don't match.

The result is another kind of failure to fit, and is there simply to be demolished.

In the midst of all this desolation, we find

a fragment of the streets that were destroyed.

Once a forge, now a cafe.

People come here from all around because it is the last bit of life remaining, and the

life comes from the building.

This returns me to Oscar Wilde's remark that all art is absolutely useless.

Put usefulness first and you lose it.

Put beauty first and what you do

will be useful forever. It turns out

that nothing is more useful than the useless.

We see this in traditional architecture with its decorative details.

Ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of

the useful and satisfy our need for harmony.

In a strange way, they make us feel at home. They

remind us that we have more than practical needs.

We are not just governed by animal appetites like eating and sleeping.

We have spiritual and moral needs too, and if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we.

We all know what it is like, even in the everyday world, suddenly to be transported

by the things we see, from the ordinary world

of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation.

A flash of sunlight, a remembered melody, the face of someone loved,

these dawn on us in the most distracted moments,

and suddenly, life is worthwhile.

These are timeless moments

in which we feel the presence of another and higher world.

From the beginning of western civilisation, poets and philosophers

have seen the experience of beauty as calling us to the divine.

Plato, writing in Athens in the 4th century BC, argued

that beauty is the sign of another and higher order.

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he wrote,

you will be able to nourish true virtue

and become the friend of God.

Plato was an idealist.

He believed that human beings are pilgrims

and passengers in this world,

who are always aspiring beyond it

to the eternal realm where we will be united with God.

God exists in a transcendental world to which we

humans aspire but which we cannot know directly.

But one way of glimpsing that heavenly sphere

here below is through the experience of beauty.

This leads to a paradox.

For Plato, beauty was first and foremost the

beauty of the human face and the human form.

The love of beauty, he thought, originates in Eros, a passion that all of us feel.

We would call this passion romantic love.

For Plato, Eros was a cosmic force which

flows through us in the form of sexual desire.

But if human beauty arouses desire...

How can it have anything to do with the divine?

Desire is for the individual, living in this world.

It is an urgent passion.

Sexual desire presents us with a choice,

adoration or appetite, love or lust.

Lust is about taking, but love is about giving.

Lust brings ugliness, the ugliness of human relations

in which one person treats another as a disposable instrument.

To reach the source of beauty, we must overcome lust.

This longing without lust is what we mean today by platonic love.

When we find beauty in a youthful person,

it is because we glimpse the light of eternity

shining in those features from a heavenly source beyond this world.

The beautiful human form is an invitation to

unite with it spiritually, not physically.

Our feeling for beauty is, therefore, a religious and not a sensual emotion.

This theory of Plato's is astonishing.

Beauty, he thought, is a visitor from another world.

We can do nothing with it, save contemplate its pure radiance.

Anything else pollutes and desecrates it, destroying its sacred aura.

Plato's theory may seem quaint to people today,

but it is one of the most influential theories in history.

Throughout our civilisation, poets, storytellers,

painters, priests and philosophers

have been inspired by Plato's views on sex and love.

If you were to just look in the poetry corner, as to the books by

people who have tried to express the platonic vision of the erotic.

Let's see where there is.

Thomas Mallory's Mort D'Arthur, John Donne,

Here and There, Gawain and the Green Knight,

Chaucer, especially The Knight's Tale, The Poems of the Pearl

Manuscript, Incredible Expressions of the Platonic Worldview.

Cavalcanti, who was the master of Dante, and Dante himself definitely.

Oh, Spencer, of course. The fairy queen.

Daffodup Willem, to take the Welsh version of it all.

The women troubadours. Christina Rossetti.

I thought you could be a bit more Victorian about it.

And so it goes on.

The early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli

illustrated the theory in this famous painting,

which shows the birth of Venus, goddess of erotic love.

Venus looks on the world from a place beyond desire.

She is inviting us to transcend our earthly appetites

and unite with her through the pure love of beauty.

Botticelli's model was Simonetta Vespucci.

Botticelli loved her until the end of her short life

and actually asked to be buried at her feet.

She represented for him Plato's ideal.

This was beauty to be contemplated but not possessed.

Plato and Botticelli are telling us that real beauty

lies beyond sexual desire.

So we can find beauty not only in a desirable young person,

but also in a face full of age, grief, and wisdom,

such as Rembrandt painted.

The beauty of a face is a symbol of the life expressed in it.

It is flesh becomes spirit,

and in fixing our eyes on it,

we seem to see right through into the soul.

Painters like Rembrandt are important for showing us

that beauty is an ordinary, everyday kind of thing.

It lies all around us. We need only the eyes to see it and the hearts to feel.

The most ordinary event can be made into something

beautiful by a painter who can see into the heart of things.

So long as the belief in a transcendental God was

firmly anchored in the heart of our civilization,

artists and philosophers continued to think of beauty in Plato's way.

Beauty was the revelation of God in the here and now.

This religious approach to the beautiful lasted for 2,000 years,

But in the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution began to sow the seeds of doubt.

The Medieval Church accepted the ancient view

that the Earth lies at the centre of the universe.

Then Copernicus and Galileo proved that the Earth circles the Sun.

And Newton completed their work.

Describing a clockwork universe

in which each moment follows mechanically from the one before.

This was the Enlightenment vision.

Which described our world as though there were no place in it for gods and spirits,

no place for values and ideals, no place for anything,

save the regular clockwork movement, which turned the moon around the earth

and the earth around the sun for no purpose whatsoever.

At the heart of Newton's universe is a god-shaped hole.

A spiritual vacuum, and one philosopher in particular set out to fill this vacuum.

That is the third Earl of Shaftesbury.

Science explains things, but, thought Shaftesbury,

its account of the world is in one way incomplete.

We can see the world from another perspective,

not seeking to use it or explain it,

but simply contemplating its appearance.

As we might contemplate a landscape or a flower.

The idea that the world is intrinsically meaningful,

full of an enchantment that it needs no religious doctrine to perceive,

answered to a deep emotional need.

Beauty was not planted in the world by God, but discovered there by people.

Shaftesbury's idea encouraged the cult of beauty,

which raised the appreciation of art and nature

to the place once occupied by the worship of God.

Beauty was to fill the God-shaped hole made by science.

Artists were no longer illustrators of the sacred stories

who worked as servants of the Church.

They were discovering the stories for themselves.

By interpreting the secrets of nature.

Landscapes, which used to be mere backgrounds to holy images,

became foregrounds,

with the human figure often lost in their folds.

But for Shaftesbury, it does not need a work of art

to present us with the beauty of the world.

We simply need to look on things with clear eyes and free emotion.

Chelsea is telling us to stop using things stop explaining

them and exploiting them, but look at them instead

Then we will understand what they mean

The message of the flower is the flower

Zen Buddhists have said similar things

Only by leaving all our interests and business to one side

do we encounter the real truth of the flower.

Seeing things that way, we discover their beauty.

The greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant,

was profoundly influenced by Shaftesbury's idea.

Kant argued that the experience of beauty

comes when we put our interests to one side,

when we look on things not in order to use

them for our purposes or to explain how they

work or to satisfy some need or appetite,

but simply to absorb them and to endorse what they are.

Consider the joy you might feel when you hold a friend's baby in your arms.

You don't want to do anything with the baby.

You don't want to eat it, to put it to any use,

or to conduct scientific experiments on it.

You want simply to look at it and to feel the great surge of delight that comes

when you focus all your thoughts on this baby and none at all on yourself.

That is what Kant described as a disinterested attitude,

and it is the attitude that underlies our experience of beauty.

To explain this is extremely difficult,

because if you haven't experienced it, you don't really know what it is.

But everybody listening to a beautiful piece of music,

looking at a sublime landscape...

Reading a poem which seems to contain the essence of the thing it describes,

everybody in an experience like that says, yes, this is enough.

But why is this experience so important?

The encounter with beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal

that it seems hardly to belong to the ordinary world.

Yet beauty shines on us from ordinary things.

Is it a feature of the world or a figment of the imagination?

Most of the time, our lives are organized by our everyday concerns.

But every now and then, we find ourselves jolted out of our complacency

in the presence of something vastly more important

than our immediate desires and interests.

Something not of this world.

From Plato to Kant, philosophers have tried to capture

the peculiar way in which beauty dawns on us.

like a sudden ray of sunlight, or a surge of love.

For Plato, the only explanation of such an experience

was its transcendental origin.

It speaks to us like the voice of God.

And Kant, too, in a much more sober way,

believed that the experience of beauty

connects us with the ultimate mystery of being.

Through beauty we are brought into the presence of the sacred.

We can understand what such philosophers mean

if we reflect on what we feel in the presence of death,

especially the death of someone loved.

We look with awe on the human body from which the life has fled.

We are reluctant to touch the dead body.

We see it as not properly a part of our world,

almost a visitor from some other sphere.

And the same sense of the transcendental arises in the experience

that inspired Plato, the experience of falling in love.

This, too, is a human universal,

and it is an experience of the strangest kind.

The face and body of the beloved are imbued with the intensest life,

but in one crucial respect, they are like the body of someone dead.

They seem not to belong in the everyday world.

Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience,

which no words seem entirely to capture.

But these great changes in the stream of life,

the urge to unite with another person,

the loss of someone loved,

are moments that we understand as sacred.

If we look at the history of the idea of beauty

we see that philosophers and artists have had good

reason to connect the beautiful and the sacred

and to see our need for beauty as something deep

in our nature, part of our longing for consolation

in a world of danger, sorrow and distress.

Today, many artists look on the idea of beauty with disdain,

a leftover from a vanished way of living

which has no real connection with the world which now surrounds us.

So there has been a desire to desecrate the experiences of sex and death

by displaying them in trivial and impersonal ways

that destroy all sense of their spiritual significance.

Just as those who lose their religion have an

urge to mock the faith that they have lost,

so do artists today feel an urge to treat

human life in demeaning ways and to mock the pursuit of beauty.

This willful desecration is also a denial of love,

an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it.

And this, it seems to me, is the most

important feature of our postmodern culture,

that it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.

Of course, this habit of dwelling on the distressing side of human life isn't new.

From the beginning of our civilization, it has been one of the tasks of art

to take what is most painful in the human condition

and to redeem it in a work of beauty.

Oh, you are men of stones!

Had I your tongues and eyes,

I'd use them so that heaven's vaults should crack.

She's gone forever.

Art has the ability to redeem life by finding

beauty even in the worst aspect of things.

Mantegna's crucifixion, displaying the cruelest and most ugly of deaths,

achieves a kind of majesty and serenity. It redeems the horror that it shows.

In the face of death, human beings can

still show nobility, compassion and dignity,

and art helps us to accept death.

By presenting it in such a light.

What about things which are not tragic, but merely sordid or depraved?

Can art find beauty even here?

This painting by Delacroix shows us the artist's bed in all its sordid disorder.

He too is bringing beauty to a thing that lacks it and bestowing a kind of blessing

on his own emotional chaos.

Delacroix says, see how these sweat-stained sheets record the troubled dreams,

the tormented energy of the person who has left them,

and how the light picks them out as though they are still animated by the sleeper.

The bed is transformed by the creative act to become something else,

a vivid symbol of the human condition,

and one which makes a bond between us and the artist.

Some people describe Tracy Emin's bed in that

way, but there is all the difference in the

world between a real work of art which makes

ugliness beautiful and the fake work of art

which shares the ugliness that it shows.

This is modern life, presented in all its randomness and disorder.

What is it that makes that art rather than just a rumpled bed?

Well, the first thing that makes it art, is because I say that it is.

You say that it is. I say that it is. The second thing is, the Tate say that it is.

But what do you want the viewer, the visitor to the gallery, to say?

You presumably don't want him to say, I think that's beautiful.

No, no one's actually said that, only me.

Do you think it's beautiful? Yeah, I do.

I think it's really beautiful, yeah. Otherwise I wouldn't have shown it.

How can this be a beautiful work of art if it makes

no attempt to transform the raw material of an idea?

It is just one sordid reality among others.

Literally, an unmade bed.

We are back with the question raised by Duchamp's urinal,

whether anything can be art.

This question occupies both the would-be innovators

and the traditionalists, like Alexander Stoddart,

a monumental sculptor whose works stand in public places around the world

as well as in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

A defender of conceptual art might say that an idea can be beautiful.

There's nothing wrong with conceptual art as such.

Yes, but this is in everybody's field of endeavour.

The lawyer can come up with a beautiful idea.

You know, the statesman, the medic,

let's cure cancer. Beautiful idea. But he

doesn't say, he's an artist in the back of that.

Conceptual art of course is entirely word bound.

It is in fact a kind of art that's exhausted in

its verbal description. So you need to just say

half a cow in a tank of formaldehyde and you've,

you're really all the way there. The object itself

then can be dumped. Tracy Emin's bed is a perfect

example of that. If you walked past a skip...

in some scheme, and you saw that bed lying there, you would walk on, but of course if

you saw even just the torso of the appalled Belvedere lying in that skip, you would be

arrested by it and you may even climb in and

try to retrieve it. Many students come to

me from sculpture departments, secretly of course.

Because they don't want to tell their tutors

that they've come to truck with the enemy.

And they say, I tried to make a model of a

figure, and I model led it in clay, and then

a tutor came up and told me to cut it in half and dump some diarrhea on top of it.

And that will make it interesting.

It's what I feel about the kind of standardised

desecration that passes for art these days.

It actually is a kind of immorality, because it is an attempt

to obliterate meaning from the human form in some way.

Well, it's an attempt to obliterate knowledge.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum,

which put beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

Those like Alexander Stoddart, who try to restore the age-old connection

between the beautiful and the sacred, are seen as old-fashioned and absurd.

The same kind of criticism is aimed at traditionalists in architecture.

One target is Leon Creer, architect of the Prince of Wales model town of Poundbury.

Designing modest streets, laid out in traditional ways,

using the well-tried and much-loved details

that have served us down the centuries,

Leoncreer has created a genuine settlement.

The proportions are human proportions.

The details are restful to the eye.

This is not great or original architecture,

nor does it try to be.

It is a modest attempt to get things right

by following patterns and examples laid down by tradition.

This is not nostalgia, but knowledge passed on from age to age.

Architecture that doesn't respect the past is not respecting the present,

because it is not respecting people's primary need from architecture,

which is to build a long-standing home.

I have shown some of the ways in which artists

and architects have followed the call of beauty.

In doing so, they have given our world meaning.

The masters of the past recognized that we have

spiritual needs as well as animal appetites.

For Plato, beauty was a path to God,

while thinkers of the Enlightenment saw art and beauty

as ways in which we save ourselves from meaningless routines

and rise to a higher level.

But art turned its back on beauty.

It became a slave to the consumer culture,

feeding our pleasures and addictions

and wallowing in self-disgust.

But that, it seems to me, is the lesson of the

ugliest forms of modern art and architecture.

They do not show reality, but take revenge on it, spoiling what might have been a home

and leaving us to wander unconsoled and alienated in a spiritual desert.

Of course it is true that there is much in the world today

that distracts and troubles us.

Our lives are full of leftovers.

We battle through noise and distraction and nothing resolves.

The right response, however, is not to endorse this alienation.

It is to look for the path back from the desert.

One that will point us to a place where the

real and the ideal may still exist in harmony.

In my own life, I have found this path more easily

through music than through any other art form.

Pergolesi was 26 when he wrote the Stabat Marta.

It describes the grief of the Holy Virgin

beside the cross of the dying Christ.

All the suffering of the world is symbolized in its exquisite lines.

Given that Pergolesi was suffering from

tuberculosis when he wrote the Stabat Mater,

he is that son dying on the cross too.

In fact, he died within a few months of the work's completion.

This is not a complex or ambitious piece of music,

simply a heartfelt expression of the composer's faith.

It shows the way in which deep and troubling emotions

can achieve unity and freedom through music.

The voice of Mary is written for two singers.

The melody rises slowly, painfully, resolving dissonance

only to be gripped by another dissonance as the voices clash,

representing the conflict and sorrow within her.

Why don't I just give you bar 18? OK. Good idea.

And here we have a very simple and sacred text.

The mother stands grieving and weeping at the cross on which her son is hanging.

That's really all that you have to say.

And a completely unmusical person would immediately

get the message that it's a piece of grieving,

wouldn't they? Absolutely.

There could be no possible doubt about that.

The music takes over the words and makes them speak to you

in another language, in your own heart.

Well, it means that today in our secular world it can delight

and move without people having to know what it's about.

We learn without the theological apparatus that there is this thing called suffering,

and that it's the destiny of all of us, but also is not the end of all of us.

In this film, I have described beauty as an essential resource.

Through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as a home,

and in doing so, we both amplify our joys

and find consolation for our sorrows.

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.

This capacity of beauty to redeem our suffering

is one reason why beauty can be seen as a substitute for religion.

Why give priority to religion?

Why not say that religion is a beauty substitute?

Better still, why describe the two as rivals?

The sacred and the beautiful stand side by side,

two doors that open onto a single space.

And in that space, we find our home.