Roger Scruton Art Quotations

In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter, but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.

Creativity is not enough... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.

In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.

There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.

Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.