In Defense of True Art

Vladyslav Nazarchuk

A great scourge has covered the land for the last hundred or more years: the loss of all beauty in art. The common people listen to modern “music,” read modern “poetry,” and look at modern “paintings,” and deep down, only find them repulsive. And yet, they keep silent, since all the critics, professors, and artists, having somehow convinced themselves that ugliness is beauty and completely perverted their senses of aesthetic, proclaim these “arts” to be legitimate, worthy of our consideration. And one can nay find a dissenting voice among all this intelligentsia. Well no longer!

Beauty in art is absolute, and is its purpose. An object of art is either beautiful or ugly, or has some elements which are beautiful and others which are ugly. And beauty depends not on observers, or an object’s relation to society, or on anything else except the object itself. It is determined by eternal, divine laws of aesthetic, and anything not aligned with these laws does not deserve to be called “art.” These laws cannot be written down in full, only approximations of them (e.g. parallel fifths are to be avoided in polyphonic music), but they exist nevertheless, and a person with a right sense of aesthetic can clearly intuit them.

Beauty is distinct from superficial pleasure i.e. works of art do not have to be pleasing, in the superficial sense, to be beautiful. For instance, dissonant intervals are not pleasing, but certainly occur in beautiful music for their expressive effect. Further, beauty is distinct from a person’s subjective tastes. People enjoy different things, and, for example, a person could find uninteresting the music of Mozart, but Mozart remains one of the greatest composers regardless.

And ultimately, laws of aesthetic come from God: it is He who is beautiful beyond measure. It is He who is the creator of the universe, Who we, as humans, imitate in our own acts of artistic creation. That art which aligns with the beauty and goodness of God, and that art alone, is worthy of its name.

In the modern day, it is true, you would be hard-pressed to find a person brave enough to hold such points. People would not like to admit the existence of absolute beauty because they are afraid of that “art” which they consume being exposed as ugly, afraid of the existence of God and the shameful realization about one’s conduct which that entails. Many artists, as well, would be quite displeased to find that their entire life’s work, with all their accolades, displays, and performances, is not worth even a penny. But it remains the sobering truth, and truth always reigns in the end.

Take music, for example. Almost all modern classical music which is now being composed is fully dissonant. What remains of its melody and harmony is strange and perverted, and its ugliness is often unbearable. Is not consonance the sacred foundation of music? Is not consonance so beautiful and pleasing, and so sweet to the ear? Dissonance, meanwhile, should only exist within a framework of overall consonance, thereby gaining its expressive power through this contrast. Reader, seconds and sevenths are dissonant always! Consonance is like bread and dissonance like butter: bread by itself is bland, but eating a tub of butter is very unhealthy. This, however, is what we get with modern composers of classical music. It is as if little demons sit atop their pens, preventing them from writing a consonance at all costs. (Analogous to this, is it that hard to make poems rhyme once in a while?) And concerning the majority of the more popular music that people actually listen to, it is quite ghastly in its own right, and often is only poison for the soul.

Such are the fruits of atheism—when people no longer have faith in God, they lose the distinction between good and evil, and thus the distinction between beauty and ugliness. Their art then lacks all life, and, their minds muddled and confused, can we expect anything good from their artistic efforts? They simply no longer remember what beauty is! They cry, “We are emancipating ourselves from the stifling prisons in which art was kept in the past!” while in truth, they only abandon the wise, hard-won guidelines which help art stay steadfast on its path to beauty. And one need not even have an explicit belief in God to make good art; it is enough to just believe in absolute Beauty! After all, all of us are imperfect, and horribly so, but God often shields our art from our own imperfections, seeing our noble efforts. Thus, I do not mean that every atheist is a bad composer, but, when society is considered as a whole, an abandonment of God ultimately has caused our ugly art.

Forgive me, friend, if these words were a bit harsh. I only sought to help direct our sentiments in the proper direction with regards to art, and, as always, to make art great again.