Human rea­son and abstract thought are pre­req­ui­sites for the appre­ci­a­tion of beauty, argues Roger Scru­ton in his lat­est book, Beauty. How­ever in his review of Beauty, Sebas­t­ian Smee—art critic of the Boston Globe—finds him­self dis­agree­ing with the sentiment.

[Scru­ton] is swayed by Plato’s idea that beauty is not just an invi­ta­tion to desire, but a call to renounce it. The idea sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but it chimes with the feel­ing we often have that the most beau­ti­ful things are some­how invi­o­late. Scru­ton argues that our inabil­ity to main­tain the nec­es­sary dis­tance and our fail­ure to respect the sov­er­eignty of the objects we con­sider beau­ti­ful have helped to bring about what he calls a “flight from beauty.” The phrase is res­o­nant. Few who have reg­is­tered devel­op­ments in art, archi­tec­ture and other aspects of life over the past 50 to 100 years could have failed to notice that beauty has suf­fered a demo­tion. From its posi­tion as a fun­da­men­tal value in art, it has been reduced to a friv­o­lous side issue or, worse, a car­rier of tainted ide­olo­gies and clichés.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily