The Importance Of Beauty In Art

For centuries, beauty was seen as a virtue in the arts. From the height of Greek art to the Renaissance to Victorian times, beauty was viewed as an eternal, transcendent quality that was highly valued in art. It was something that allowed the audience to transcend the real world into the ideal one. Today, however, it appears that within our culture we have shifted as a whole - utility has taken prevalence over beauty in life and in art. Beauty no longer sits upon the mantle of virtue but is rather cast to the wayside in everyday life as well as in contemporary art, deemed unnecessary. It holds no “real-world” use. Beauty has now become an afterthought, culturally and artistically. No more are the days of transforming difficult subjects into beautiful paintings, pain into something comforting, paint into poetry, sadness into symphonies, and love into sonnets. Many times when one decides to venture into the depths of beauty within their own artistic endeavors they are regarded as “old-fashioned” or “cliche.” Harkening back to tradition for inspiration is perceived as a weakness within the contemporary art scene, as it displays one’s lack of ability to be

One of many elements of beauty is aesthetics. As Roger Scruton, a renowned philosopher, and professor at Oxford says in his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, “We discern beauty in concrete objects and abstract ideas, in works of nature and of art, in things, animals, and people, in objects, qualities, and actions.” Beauty is more than just the appearance of the thing in art - beauty can be seen as a culmination of various aspects coming together such as emotional honesty, passion, and the truth of the human experience. The fact that we find beauty in everyday mundane things, and we have throughout the course of history, is a major factor in why there is such thing as the existence of objective