On beauty

Oscar Wilde famously said, “All art is useless”, while Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. So if art is about beautiful stuff, why is it useless?And if it’s useless, why does it matter? 

It’s useless because its value lies in itself and not in its function. It may have no function. For example, if one wants to get a job in today’s economy, a degree in, say, philosophy is arguably of little instrumental value, especially as compared to a degree in economics or business studies. Yet we continue to teach philosophy because of its inherent value. My old apartment in Prague had an ornate façade bristling with carvings, and a stairwell of elaborate mosaic tiles whose only function was to be beautiful. My apartment in Tokyo, in contrast, is purely functional. The windows are simple squares fitted with safety glass. The stairwell has beige rubber flooring. It lacks beauty because there is nothing unnecessary or useless about it.

What’s wrong with beige rubber flooring and safety glass? Well, people need to feel that they are capable of creating beauty. The natural world, be it jungle, desert, mountain or ocean, is without exception beautiful. The only ugly things to be seen, wherever one may look, are manmade. The sense that we belong to a species that can only deface and bespoil the world brings with it a heavy burden of guilt, which in turn may lead to depression or aggression. Thus, manmade things must, at least some of the time, be beautiful if we are to be happy. 

I want to be happy, so I’d very much like to take credit for this beautiful insight, but it was Stephen Fry. A beautiful man indeed.