"Costly Confessions"

Washington Free Beacon:  Art critics, like Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic, know the price of everything and the value of nothing, Roger Scruton says in an essay about kitsch that begins his latest book, Confessions of a Heretic. Today critics praise modern art filled with so much that “tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap.”

Although early modernists such as Eliot and Pound sincerely attempted to make room for the human spirit in modern life through discipline and sacrifice, according to Scruton, the hard task of sustaining that tradition “proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it.” Later modernists rejected that costly tradition in favor of a different, century old one of ugly and effortless clichés. Now it is easy to make, sell, and display the objects of the artist, critic, and audience.

Scruton writes that many people today, including his fellow philosophers, favor affordable dogmas that require little thought, instead of the more arduous and costly task of conservatism. Needless to say, this stance has not ingratiated Scruton to some. His new anthology is titled Confessions of a Heretic because the essays in it “reveal aspects of my thinking which, if I am to believe my critics, ought to have been kept to myself.” The essays share the overall theme that Westerners increasingly act like Wilde’s cynic: We value good feelings but do not value the difficult means of sustaining our inheritance. (Please read the whole thing if you can)

http://freebeacon.com/culture/costly-confessions/#sthash.pk2fvPWe.dpuf