Beauty

Jenson again: Western history teaches that “the experience of beauty does not survive the cessation of worship. Precisely those who thematically dedicate themselves to beauty, and who within the modern Western tradition regularly just so abandon worship, are in wave after wave driven at last to deny beauty as well. The avant-gardes of nineteenth and twentieth-century art have one upon the other denounced beauty, proclaiming that to be art which anybody calls such. And if the one artist hangs a toilet seat on the gallery wall, only to have it pointed out that he chose a fine example and placed it artfully, the next ideologist will choose a wretched example and bury it underground.”