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Beauty
Dave Beech
Roger Scruton, Beauty, Oxford University Press, 2009, 176pp, hb, 26 b&w illus, 10.99, 978 0 1995595 2 7. Roger Scruton is the UK leading conservative philosopher. There is a strong relationship between his conservatism and the publication of this book on beauty. In one sense it is odd that he had not written this book earlier, given his longstanding interest in aesthetics and music. But in another sense given that Scruton has always been perversely topical the arrival of this book at this historical moment is absolutely in keeping with what we might call his strategy as a defender of conservative values. He has consistently provided philosophical backing to unpopular conservative causes, delivering ammunition against animal rights and in favour of hunting, for instance, or defending the tobacco industry (writing a pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs attacking the World Health Organization while, controversially, he was on the payroll of Japan Tobacco International to the tune of 4,500 a month). Scrutons love of beauty is intertwined with his hatred of rebellion, revolt and revolution. For him, beauty promises order, virtue and traditional values. He sees beauty as valuable because it is an antidote, at least in his reading, to entertainment, relativism, critique and contemporary art. It is useful, therefore, to remember that Scruton is an opportunist who spells out the arguments that his readers might use in their daily encounters with leftists, radicals, liberals, rebels and subversives whenever the opposition looks hesitant or weak; the high-brow equivalent of the PR groups that produce lists of talking points to shape debate in the media. So, Scruton has written what amounts to a handbook for conservatives who wish to oppose contemporary thinking on culture and make the case for something more orthodox, certain and consecrated. It is worth looking in detail at Scrutons commitment to beauty in the context of his frustration with contemporary critical thinking. Scruton discovered his conservatism as a student in Paris in 1968, watching clashes between students and the police and realising that he had no sympathy for the activists and a strong conviction on the side of law and order. I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew, he reminisced in his article Why I Became a Conservative in 2003. A radical student in 1968 suggested he read Foucaults The Order of Things, in order to underDEC - JAN

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stand the activities of those on the street. But he rejected the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. And he rejected it in the strongest terms, culminating with a bitter pleasure not only at the demise of the struggle but in the death of his opponent: And Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the result of sprees in the bath-houses of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an intellectual celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all over Europe and America. Scrutons book on beauty is pockmarked with this sort of hate. While he speaks with subtlety and respect for the likes of the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Kant as coaxing us towards the endorsement of a system, with far-reaching implications, he rejects post-Duchampian art theory by saying, the literature of this industry is as tedious as the neverending imitations of Duchamps gesture; and while he praises Kenneth Clarks celebrated study of the nude, he chastises liberalism and popular culture: The problem with classical liberalism is that it never pauses to examine what is involved in not harming others. Do I leave others unharmed when I destroy my capacity for personal relationships, through drug-taking, promiscuity, or porn addiction? Do I leave them unharmed when I stupefy myself with pop music? He sees Modernism as an aberration. The repudiation of beauty gains strength from a particular vision of modern art and its history in which the value of art is a shock value: art exists to awaken us to our historical predicament and to remind us of the ceaseless change which is the only permanent thing in human nature. He couldnt resist that last exaggeration. In architecture and literature we find the same story, of art at war with its past, forced to challenge the rule of clichs, and to set off on a path of transgression. But he really shows his cards when he follows this generic attack with a specific opposition. However, he writes, the story is fed on a onesided diet of examples. At the moment when Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were engaged in their (to my mind highly repetitive experiments), Edward Hopper was producing figurative paintings that showed him to be as much the painter of modern American life as Manet had been. So, he argues, there is another, and truer, history of the modern artist, a history of Hopper, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse and Arnold Schoenberg in short, a conservative modernism rewritten as recuperation rather than transgression. But Scruton often reveals his ignorance of the critical traditions that he opposes. He sidelines George Lukcs, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton and many more by asserting: If you want to dismiss the concept of aesthetic inter-

est as a piece of bourgeois ideology [none of the above writers made this very naive claim], then the onus is on you to describe the non-bourgeois alternative, in which the aesthetic attitude would be somehow redundant, and in which people would no longer need to find solace in the contemplation of beauty. What we find in these writers, however, is not the attempt to make aesthetics redundant, but rather the analysis of the many ways in which aesthetics is intertwined with non-aesthetic structures, forces and economies. The point is not to abolish beauty but to understand how aesthetics routinely converts social distinctions into apparently natural ones. Scruton gets into a lather about kitsch, pornography and addiction, categories which he expands to the point where they include everything except for the higher life and normal desire that he associates with morality and consecration in a defence of modesty, decency and shame. Again, he sets up the opposition in terms that favour his easy dismissal of anything other than hearth and home. However, he does not attack the pornography industry, its studios, magnates, distributors and so on. He picks on the woman on page three. When he sees no clear battle to be had with his enemies on the left, Scruton is capable of some subtle thinking. For instance, he offers a careful and interesting discussion of the relationship between aesthetic judgements and the reasons given for them. Instead of taking one of the obvious candidates, he argues that although aesthetic judgements can never be simply learned responses this does not mean that we cannot develop our aesthetic judgements through knowledge. Arguing about the merits and qualities of works, he says, can lead to sudden and radical changes of perception, experience and judgement. Beauty is not simply a matter of taste, then, which is our private and inscrutable property. Beauty can be disclosed with good reasons that transform our perception of the work. It is a useful addition to the way that aesthetics is routinely discussed today. Naturally, Scruton quickly puts this insight into use for a conservative ideology, concluding that the reasons we give for our aesthetic judgements are presented as appropriate or right. He ruins a good argument by insisting that the point of the discussion is to end discussion. He is allergic to openness and habitually short-circuits his arguments to make sure that we understand that at the end of it there is order, objectivity, universal truth and consensus. In effect, Scruton has not written a book on beauty at all, but utilised questions around beauty to argue for a revival of the concept of virtue. No matter what the topic, his conservatism forces him to talk about virtue. This is because virtue is his
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Sylvester draws out the strands of the different arguments, illustrating, qualifying or countering each position with real-world examples. The slash in the title is important to Sylvester, however, because she doesnt want to limit the discussion to museums, wishing instead to analyse the role of art itself. This is all well and good, but at times there is an overreliance on theories that seem outdated or perhaps give only a partial account of the history of contemporary art. Specifically, in attempting to weld together an end of narrative, she draws on 1980s texts that problematise the idea of a single thread of art history. This ties neatly, for Sylvester, to other end of theses in history, philosophy and IR but havent discussions moved on since then? Is it really best to rely on 30-year-old ofthe-moment texts, no matter how interesting they are, when examining the Hoxton scene? Didnt the 9/11 events shake the postmodern idea of free-floating, independent narratives? Hasnt the credit crunch scuttled the notion that neo-liberal capitalism has won the day and ended all economic and political arguments? The theoretical discussions around contemporary art merely confirm that Sylvester is not an art specialist. For example, in a passage concerning museum deaccessioning, she goes along with the mainstream fallacy that Charles Saatchi is a serious art collector rather than a super dealer, when a closer analysis or a read of this months Salerooms (p39) clearly shows how his collection is churned through the auction houses at a rate that few dealers could match in regular gallery sales. The readers confidence in the research is further eroded when simple errors litter the pages: Tracy Emin, Huxton Square, Michael Serota and Damien Hirsch etc. And yet the book remains a fascinating read, drawing diverse museum strategies together for analysis and showing that, if the world is experiencing a Clash of Civilisations, the soft power of cultural diplomacy might be more effective than the hard power of the military. As Sylvester shows, when US troops build a fortified camp among the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, digging anti-tank trenches near the foundations of the ziggurat tower considered the site of the Tower of Babel, they are merely continuing a millennium-old tradition of cultural warfare, where admired treasures are looted, denigrated symbols destroyed and misunderstood artefacts trampled. In a hearts and minds campaign, the military is part of the problem rather than the solution. Overlapping with some of Sylvesters research interests, Charlotte Klonks Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 is a scholarly examination of the changing methods of display in art galleries. This laser-like focus on gallery interiors, which narrows even further with a particular interest in Berlin, London and New York, explains the purpose of the different display methods in terms of evolving conceptions of the role of the viewer. Klonk tracks the formation of state-run public museums and examines how directors showcased collections through principles aimed at creating an informed audience of citizens of the nation as opposed to subjects of the kingdom or empire. We follow the evolution as the audience is conceived variously as informed citizen (mid-1800s), individual contemplator of interior subjectivities (turn of the century Romanticism), active unit within a collaborative practice (Bauhaus), informed tastemaker within a Consumer Republic (MoMA) and finally the present-day discrete consumer of immersive spectacle. Each step is distinguished by strategies of display tailored to these changing audiences. Alongside the changing role of the viewer, gallery design is also charted against its contemporary scientific understanding of perception, from Goethes theories of colour, which had great influence over the first days of Londons National Gallery, to the use of Einsteins theories of relativity in shaping El Lissitzkys exhibition designs. Curators use of such sources appears to have tailed off recently, which is odd considering the rise in scientific studies of consumer behaviour in retail environments (but perhaps curators will be reinvigorated by the Mapping Museum Experience experiment Artnotes AM328). Klonks writing is assured and leads the reader through historical developments with clear descriptions, quotes from articles and letters by the leading protagonists, and photos where possible. But it is the authors concise summations of the meaning of the historical data that elevates the publication; at each step she leaves the reader in no doubt about the curators political understandings of their exhibition viewers. For example, in discussing Lissitzkys 1928 Abstract Cabinet display at the Landesmuseum in Hanover, which Klonk clearly considers a zenith of exhibition design, she concludes: Lissitzkys room was meant to provide an immediate psycho-physical experience of what it would be like to act as a collective subject in a post-capitalist society in which interactive engagement counted more than individuality and interiority. What more could you want? But Klonk doesnt content herself with historical analysis; in bringing the activities of the past to bear on the present, she goes on to suggest that the Abstract Cabinet offers a model of genuine viewer engagement that she feels is lacking in much of the Relational Aesthetics work that might otherwise appear founded on a similar conception of the viewer. And in the light of the continuing debates around ideas of viewer engagement for example, in Art Monthlys recent features on public art or this issues Freee interview with Vito Acconci Spaces of Experience deserves a wider audience than museum directors, for whom it is a must. An active and very specific viewer is proposed in a quite different book. Artist Henry Bond has deepened his photographic analysis of the everyday with the extraordinary Lacan at the Scene. This publication takes a studiously analytical approach to what could have been a lighthearted thought experiment: what if French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had become a British murder detective in the 1950s? Bond spent several years studying police case files at the national archives in Kew, examining images of death through the prism of Lacanian thought. He dismantled the crimes, separating the motives behind them into the classic
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agent of political change. Unlike the liberal, the conservative wants to improve, to aspire to higher feelings and better conduct. The revolutionary is, in this respect, closer to the conservative than the laissez-faire liberal. The difference is that the conservative wants us to aspire to all the well-found certainties of the canon, established hierarchies and consecrated institutions, whereas the revolutionary believes that there can be no new man without a new society. Scruton loves beauty because he wants to improve society simply by pressurising the rest of us to be more conservative in our tastes, pleasures and behaviour.
DAVE BEECH is an artist in the collective Freee.

Winter Reading 09
David Barrett
Christine Sylvester, Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It, 978 1 5945146 5 4 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, 978 0 3001519 6 1 Henry Bond, Lacan at the Scene, 978 0 2620134 2 0 Sally OReilly, The Body in Contemporary Art, 978 0 5002040 0 9 Marcia Farquhars 12 Shooters, ed J Maizlish 978 0 9546040 8 0 Trish Morrissey: Front, ed Anne McNeill, 978 0 9063610 7 9 Emmanuel Almborg, The Rest is Silence, 978 9 1978447 0 3 Christine Sylvester feels that the study of international relations (IR) has been missing a trick of late. Even though it has splintered into disparate camps, none of these has really focused on the use of soft power by art museums in issues of international diplomacy. In Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It, Sylvester highlights why such an omission is significant. The bulk of her argument is developed using specific examples of museums engaging in activities that might be analysed using the tools of IR: the British Museums claim to the Elgin Marbles; the museum sectors response to the looting of Baghdads National Museum during the US invasion of Iraq; MoMAs role in the Cold War; the Guggenheims decision to open in Bilbao; and the possibility of a museum at the site of New Yorks World Trade Center towers. Each of these studies provides a fascinating insight into the political nuances of the debates that surround them, for example the question of whether important cultural artefacts might best be described as national or global treasures; that is, are they always best preserved in the geographical location where they were made even if that site has undergone huge cultural change or is a site of current conflict or should significant artefacts be preserved for humanity in international (read western) museums where they will be accessible but protected?
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