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Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

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Joshua Gibbs

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“An egalitarian culture (which is no longer particular to progressives, but de rigueur among conservative Christians, as well) cannot fail to hate beauty, for beauty is riotously unfair. The more acclimatized to socialist thought America becomes, the less talent will be allowed to matter. The late aggrandizement of pretentious hacks like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko betrays the progressivist’s frustration with the inequalities beauty invariably establishes.”

ArtConservatism
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“The average man sees an ugly avant-garde painting, learns it sold for a hundred million dollars, and cannot help responding, “But I could have painted that,” which is exactly the point. The progressive art critic might not claim the beauty of Pollock’s paintings was inherent in the paintings themselves, but in the ideas the painting communicates— although, it should be noted, every art critic has much to gain in championing art which cannot be understood without an interpreter.”

ArtConservatismGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Physical beauty is eminently more impressive, visceral, and humbling than artistic Beauty. Were a human being the likes of Nicole Kidman or Paul Newman to stand on display in the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and were patrons of the museum able to gaze with impunity—not covertly and from a distance, but from point blank range as though the living spectacles were mere portraits— many people would quickly leave behind the artistic beauty of Rembrandt and Titian.”

ArtBeautyConservatism
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“Beauty is a liability. “Beauty will save the world,” but don’t tell the Trojans that. “Save the world? Beauty is tearing the world apart!” Any starry-eyed messiah quoting Dostoyevsky from the walls of Troy would have been pitched over. The beauty of Helen threw the cosmos out of whack. The beauty of Sarai jeopardized Abram’s trip into Egypt. So, too, a beautiful sunbather may upset the peace of a family trip to the beach and a beautiful priest might easily distract from mass or compromise confession.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“As soon as one generation undertakes a project which can be finished in a single lifetime, their children have incentive to scrap that project in favor of projects more suited to their own tastes and values. Any social or cultural project which will take fifty years to accomplish encounters profound existential threats halfway through, for everyone who started the project begins to age out of productivity and those have just entered the project have both incentive and ability to redirect time and funds to a more fashionable project which does not seem so old-fashioned.”

ArtBeautyTradition
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“Any cultural project which only takes ten years to complete is easily undone. As an ideology, then, the problem with “Change the world” is that it is too easily accomplished. “Change” is doable over and over again, and new projects of “change” undermine and abolish the changes of a previous generation. Everyone who “changes the world” is undermining or abolishing the change some wide-eyed, well-meaning dreamer undertook just a few years ago. “Change the world” always involves crushing the dream of someone slightly older than yourself who wanted to do the same thing. Thus we reach a paradox: unless a society undertakes a project it cannot hope to accomplish, it will not accomplish anything lasting.”

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Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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