Why Beauty Matters, Roger Scruton

Seen on American Digest. It's a long video.

Truth, beauty and goodness. 

But where do I even start with you? 

Language is also an art. And you cannot even bring yourself to enunciate one of two crucial consonants in the monosyllabic word for your exegesis. The word is art, not aht. 

Urinal. Your EYE nal. 

Are you even serious? Listening to British discuss aht with gravitas mispronouncing every other word is genuinely laughable.

And through all that I'm supposed to take you seriously. 

Fine. I'll struggle with that.

Design is art. Utilitarian design is art and it is beautiful. We are surrounded by the art of good design. Every doorknob is art. Every fork, every plate, every teapot. Every chair, every sofa. The design of a urinal actually is art. So is the bathroom sink and the bathtub. The designs of faucets and shower heads are especially good design and truly great art. 

The thing is, our lives are filled with design choices. That is our daily choices about art. We pick between the beauty of straight utility and some other kind of embellished design art. 

Here's an example. The apartment management where I live wants to add a metal clip to each door to attach its communications (the communications themselves are un-artful but they try.)  Instead of taping their papers (loaded with clip art) to the door. What kind of paper clamp do they choose? The most utilitarian possible. That is their design/art decision. A metal paper clamp as seen in offices, screwed to the door. They automatically make every door ugly. They're nice doors too. They take a nice conservatively stylish door, a thoughtfully designed door and entryway, and screw their ugly little office clamp onto each one of them. All eight floors of doors. 

Then the office factotums tape the messages to the doors anyway, and there goes all that thought, excellent utilitarian design, art, and beauty.