Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.
Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.
Anyone that says looks don't count is lying.
Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
