“Dramatic growth in consumption has happened in the last thirty years: a period when the arts and the humanities have been unambitious in their efforts to guide and educate taste. The accumulated wisdom of humanity, concerning what is beautiful, interesting, fine or serious, was – to a large extent – left to one side at the precise time when the need for guidance was greatest, and when guidance was hardest to give, and so required maximum effort and confidence.

When one looks at celebrated figures of those worlds – such as Andy Warhol or today, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst – and asks what does their art say to people about consuming, the answer is very little. I do not want to attack those particular individuals; they seem, amoung other, to be creations of a profoundly damaged culture that tells itself it is being clever and sophisticated and up to date for the wrong reasons. The cultural laurels – and a species of authority that goes with them – have been awarded in unfortunate directions. Mockery, irony and archness are not what we need.

While the works of these artists have gained amazing commercial success, they suggest a loss of purpose in the arts. Loss, that is, of a really central and powerful claim upon the education of taste: upon the sense of what is beautiful, gracious or attractive.

We have suffered an astonishing corruption of consciousness practised upon us by a decadent cultural elite. Think of the language of contemporary praise: a building is admired because it is ‘interesting’ – like the average newspaper column. The gap between ‘interesting’ and ‘glorious’ or ‘adorable’ is vast. An artist is praised for being ‘provocative’ – like someone bleating into a mobile phone on a crowded train. We are miles from ‘profound’,’tender’, ‘magnificent’.

All of this has come about because of a misreading of history. It has been supposed that the point of high culture – of the greatest imaginative and creative effort – is to unseat some fantasized ruling class who had to be provoked and distressed into change. But that is not the task of art or intelligence. Their real task is to shape and direct our longings, to show us what is noble and important. And this is not a task that requires any kind of cagey, elusive obscurity. The way forward here is to be more demanding, truthful and – at first – courageous. We have to forget the shifting patterns of fashion. Something is good because it is good, not because it was created yesterday or five hundred years ago.”
– John Armstrong