Aesthetic Decline Quotes

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

We're getting dumbed down, taste-wise.

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

It falls apart now. They used to be intrinsically linked. Now they've been driven so far apart that I don't think the one has anything to do with the other. Even more so: I think that there is almost a reaction against style, that brute ugliness somehow has been interpreted as being the way to go.

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.