Why is modern art so bad?

Aesthetic relativism is no less pernicious than moral relativism or postmodern theories of truth.  Yet we rarely hear the same complaints about ugliness that we do about immorality or tolerating falsehood.  Perhaps beauty seems a less important matter, or we have refused to question the lie that beauty is a mere subjective judgment.

There is a case to be made that of the three, it is the assault on beauty that is of more consequence than that on goodness or truth (if we were absurdly required to rank them).  One response might be simply to observe that aesthetic relativism actually preceded the intellectual assault on public standards of morality and truth.

This is somewhat speculative though.  The consequences of the modern assault on Classical conceptions of beauty is less so: without holding to the timeless aesthetic standards that determine what is beautiful, judgments of quality or inferiority are baseless.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What constitutes art today lacks any criteria to measure it save the shock value of novelty, which is no standard at all, and itself a mark of a cultural rejection of any standard of beauty.

This isn’t only a loss to the arts.  It also marks the inevitable demise of education, whose former ideal of being ‘cultivated’ lost its compass when beauty became subjective, and the ideological plaything of those in power (of whatever political persuasion they were).

Alexander Solzhenitzyn remarked upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 that ‘beauty will save the world.’

For those accustomed to the dictates of aesthetic relativism, the expression is at best a pious bit of nonsense.  But for Solzhenitzyn, like all those acquainted with the Classical standards that marked Christian art, the affections are what lead the reason and the will.  Christian art is beautiful in a way that can only be explained by an innate sense of the universal, the mysterious, and the numinous, which were the cultural expressions of an acquaintance with a God who is the essence of beauty, goodness, and truth.

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