I’ve had a few conversations about beauty and lack of beauty in my surroundings in the past few days. Talking about an art museum, various churches, and an old historic house.
In the conversation about art I couldn’t quite define the distinction I wanted to make. I had just started reading this essay and gotten as far as the C. S. Lewis quotes on subjectivism. That was in the back of my mind during that conversation. So the distinction I roughly settled on was not separating beautiful from ugly with “is this painting beautiful?” or “is it depicting something beautiful?” but something like “is this pointing at something bigger?” but without a for definition of what that question meant. That would include plenty of ugly things also, of course. The category it rules out is art looking for a reaction, but not in a “something bigger” sort of way. I’m not satisfied with this explanation of the conversation but it’s what I have.
The half the conversations about churches and historic houses boiled down to “people won’t pay for those materials and workmanship anymore”. I don’t really have a critique of overall style change through the decades/centuries, I have my own opinions but not a lot of interest in architectural schools of thought. But it seems along with standardized easy-to-use building materials making construction easier, it has made it harder to choose to build interesting-looking buildings.
The other half of the church and house conversations is that there is more focus on the stuff inside making a house/church beautiful rather than the form & exterior. More private beauty, less public. More specific, less holistic.
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