Will classical beauty in the arts ever make a resurgence?

We live in a primitive time, don’t we, Will? Neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it.

Art must strive for originality. Anything less is mere decoration.

No life has changed and classical beauty is dead as the dodo. Maybe there are other forms of beauty. I don't see them but I assume younger people do. In terms of the classical arts you can say farewell. And if you doubt me just look at the artistic and PR disaster Lincoln Center has turned into.

Also I believe fewer young people with lots of money want to support arts organizations the way older generations did. That's why Yellow Peter tried to sell the Chagall murals hanging in the front of the Met. What a clown.

No OP.

This will be unpopular but I find much classical art very overrated. Too austere.

Hitler tried to eradicate all non-classical art. He argued that Modern art and all that follows is corruptive. And he ordered the murders of six million people. Let’s stick with postmodernism!

It doesn't have to be either/or, R7, despite what Hitler might tell you.

R6 you connect with it or you don't all according to your own tastes.

Every now and then, I see a film that strikes me as a throwback to a day gone by when movies were beautiful and there was glamour. I don't think this works for every movie, though. Who wants to see a movie like The Shawshank Redemption shot like a fucking MGM musical? It wouldn't really be very emotionally involving. The aesthetic has to work for the story.

I think I'm a reincarnation of somebody who enjoyed going to the theater and movies in the early to mid 20th Century. I can't figure out why else I can't respond to current culture the way my peers do. I'll think a current film is shit and they love it or I try to show them an old film and they fall asleep. Very strange.

R11, I think we should be best friends. I'm the same way.

I hope!

No.

I live in Manhattan, and there are so many beautiful old buildings (I know, I know, they’re better in Europe) here. I love them. Not that I know shit about architecture, but they have scale and character and beautiful ornamentation. One near me has some rather bizarre characters along with the squirrel and owl and oak and laurel motifs.

The garbage new construction that’s going up at an alarming pace (and timetable; how stable can they be?) are ugly and austere. There’s no beauty or mystery to them.

Nope, just more and more degenerate mediocrity, all the way down to oblivion.

I have hope for film and literature. Maybe music.

Architecture is hopeless.

Things move in cycles. As economies change and culture changes so does artistic taste. When the hoopla of the end of the age of oil ends, so will the current tastes end or change.

For a take on this, read James Howard Kunstler and check out his eyesores of the month.

Taste is subjective. You want to believe that everything is going downhill because you hate and fear progress (despite the fact that gays have benefited from progress more than anyone)

It’s definitely not about progress. Progress would be a continuation and a surpassing. Instead we branched off. But, some of the directions didn’t lead to beauty IMHO. There’s value in those new things, but it’s a different currency.

[quote] Is beauty a myth or too cultish to follow now? We never expounded on what the past aspired to, despite our easier lives and ever-expanding technology.

What?

I think that we will enter an almost "Rococo" period in the future. Architecture, art, graphics, and fashion of this time will look simplistic and boring.

Cars are ugly now. Why and how did we get here?

According to Nietzschean philosophy of art, beauty in art was invented to appease a saddened soul or a troubled society. Ugliness in art, on the other hand, was invented for stable societies that seek a sense of threat and excitement when these are difficult to find in real life. That is why he refused to follow Schopenhauer in his interpretation of the Greek tragedy, that tragedy expresses the yearning to renounce life. Nietzsche, on the contrary, saw it as proof of the strength of the Greek soul, which allowed itself to contemplate the tragic without being conquered by the feeling of existential despair.

The ugly and the sad once again appeared in the art and science of Nietzsche's time: for example, in the naturalism of Zolla's novels. His appraisal of these movements was less positive than for Greek tragedy. But in his view this movement proved not only the vulgarity of the 19th century, but also its strong spirit, which allowed for a greater degree of honesty about human nature, about its fundamental bestiality, than past centuries did.

With advances in science, one lives with much less fear of death and of the unknown today than in the 19th century. And because of social advances, for example in labor rights, one lives today with more comfort and dignity than the middle and working classes of the past did. So I would say, based on all this, that the psychological need for beauty in art is lower than ever in our days. What has really increased is boredom. And boredom makes us long for challenge, threats, terror, in short, the ugly.

Another thing, too: secularization is not very conducive to beauty in art. The beauty and loftiness of the ancient Greek temples, the Gothic churches, the Egyptian pyramids were not merely the result of the architect's talent and inspiration. These qualities were produced with the very conscious intention to provoke in the worshiper awe and respect for the divine. It is as if the noble appearance of these buildings invited the faithful to leave his vulgar, sinful nature outside and behave in a more civilized, virtuous, divine way on the inside.

In this de-divinized world, who would aim for this effect? Who would need it? Banks? hotels? Any secular institution that sought to project itself in this way would be the target of ridicule, and rightly so.

The same applies to democratization. The great architectural projects that we so admire today, such as the Pantheon and the Taj Mahal, were built by people we would today call tyrants when they wanted to project their glory and wealth in order to provoke in the commoner the same feeling of happy submission to the superior which was described above. That is also why the royalty and aristocracy of Europe were so garishly dressed until the 20th century. The countless jewels, the expensive and shiny fabrics, the loose-fitting clothes: everything was meant to overwhelm the commoner and inspire submission by reminding him, by visual contrast, of the insurmountable superiority of the sovereign over the commoner. Imagine if a president of a democracy dared to dress like Louis XIV today? Again, he would be mocked, and rightly so, even if he had the money to dress himself up with so much pageantry.

In a democracy, we do not accept the superiority of the president over the voter. And this is reflected in fashion. The president does not stand out very much from a crowed of well-dressed middle-class citizens - so doing is no longer allowed, nor is it necessary.

* crowd

That’s fascinating r23. Where did you learn all of this?