- old Scruttlebollocks argues for the beauty of religous experience too - and you're a fairly militant Dawkinsite ain't ya?

But I will say that whilst I can appreciate modern art (that's a big term isn't it?) on a technical level, it fails to move me emotionally, quite often.
I suppose I'm talking about the last 30-odd years.
Got nothing against Cubists or Abstract Expressionists or any of those guys and gals. It's when it gets Conceptual that it loses me.
Where can I catch this diatribe? I'd like to see / hear it.

Am UK dwelling (for now, ha ha!) so will iPlayer it.
Good to have some intellectual stimulation first thing on a Sunday morning!
If I can think of anything coherent I will opine.

I have a lot of time for post-war art but there's not a lot of beauty in it; certainly since the 1960s.

But did catch a snooty dismissal of it on Radio 4 last night.

He is a ridiculous figure; Brian Sewell without any of the camp likability. He used to write for the Times a lot and his attitudes were laughable. After one of his pieces I would turn to the Daily Mail for some optimistic, progressive thoughts.

It seems he is pro-fox hunting largely because he likes to wear hunting pink and he is pro-high church because he like all the whistle and flutes of proper ritual. Why doesn't he join the orthodox church then? More ridiculously, he is anti - what he calls with a curled lip - "pop music" because it is repetitive and uncomplicated. I remember him being on Radio 4 explaining how he leads Music Appreciation classes for his undergraduates, telling them how Mozart is better than U2 because he makes more complicated music, with more harmonies, better tunes and less bothersome rhythms. This is the classic adolescent argument for prog rock; where more notes are better than less and any form of unadorned simplicity is simply a very bad thing.

Like all of his kind, he wants to go back to what he calls "traditional values." What does he mean by that? As far as I can gather this would be the period; "before sex was invented, between the end of the "Chatterley" ban, and the Beatles' first LP." You know, the 1950s - because EVERYONE just loves that decade SO much. I bet he hates emails and computers. Why not go back to Victorian times? Things were more traditional then. None of these working class adolescent oiks would be messing around with electronically amplified instrumentation and spray cans. They'd be up chimneys with no laws to protect them.

count the number of times you see them at the start of sentences in the "qualtity press" or even Word.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"

and I thought it was a wonderful programme, although I have certain reservations about it.

Firstly I wish that the programme makers had put as much thought into the visuals as Roger Scruton did into the writing. It was full of the annoying hallmarks of modern television such as pointless edits, hyperactive camerawork and awful lighting. It would have been great if it had been a beautiful programme to watch (in the tradition of Civilization or Alistair Cooke's America) but it wasn't.

The first thing Scruton said that I found particularly telling was 'one word is written large on all these ugly things - and that word is me.' I could not agree more with him on this point. Obviously all artists have an ego and are speaking in part about themselves in all they create. But to me great art occurs most frequently when the artist ceases to be concerned purely with the narrow preoccupations of self and casts his gaze outwards into the world. He may then find increased knowledge of himself in that which the image he has created reflects back at him.

The problem I have with a great deal of modern art (particularly of the 'conceptual' variety) is that it seems so terribly egotistical. Artists like Tracy Emin or the photographer like Nan Goldin seem to treat their work as an ongoing visual diary which is almost exclusively concerned with the minutiae of their own lives. It is as if they are incapable or unwilling to let go of themselves for long enough to see what the world might be like for other people. This is a terribly limiting position to adopt and often results in it being difficult for the viewing public to recognize something of themselves in their work. How can they, when the work is all about Tracy Emin?

I don't much like talking about my photography (it's easy to come across as a pretentious twat), but I will try to express something of what it means to me here as it's relevant to the ideas put forward in the programme. Scruton said that 'the most ordinary event can be made into something beautiful by a painter who can see into the heart of things'. 'Seeing into the heart of things' is, I suppose, what attracts me to photography. Photography has taught me to see. To see things not simply as they 'are' but as what they have the potential to be. The moments when I am able to recognize this potential in a scene are invariably when I am least concerned with myself, with Patrick Crowther. If I can forget about my trivial self and truly look at what is around me then there is the chance that I might produce something worthwhile. These fleeting moments of transfiguration - in which, say, a decaying old wall seems like a vision of the cosmos - are what I search for. And here lies something that I don't think Scruton really touched on - that beauty may be found in things that on the surface appear 'ugly' simply by looking at them from a different perspective. I believe that beauty lies in the most unlikely places.

Here are some of my photographs that hopefully illustrate what I've written above:

Perhaps my biggest problem with Scruton's thesis lies in the fact that he did not allow for the possibility that there may still be artists and architects who aren't afraid or dismissive of beauty. I think this was a serious flaw in his argument. One only has to look at Santiago Calatrava's bridges to see that form doesn't have to follow function in the 21st century.

And just last week I went to see the exhibition by the sculptor Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Art. I enjoyed all the works greatly, but one in particular had an incredibly profound effect on me. I sat on the floor and stared at it for over an hour, and found myself in a state of deep relaxation that was brought about by the very beauty which Scruton believes to be so lacking in modern art. Key to Kapoor's worth as an artist in my opinion is his oft-repeated belief that he has nothing to say. He allows people the space to be able to find their own meaning in his art, unlike those conceptualists for whom the idea is everything and the work itself almost an afterthought. I left the exhibition with a delightful feeling of optimism about the place of art in our modern society, with the feeling that no amount of charlatans displaying cans of excrement can succeed in denegrating its true value.

Despite its flaws, I thought Scruton shone a revealing light on a subject that couldn't be any closer to my heart.

Firstly it didn't address the idea that our idea of what is beautiful has changed over time. When the Georgian squares in London where thrown up by speculative builders (to make a fast buck from a London rich on the profits of the slave trade) they were widely disliked. Indeed many aspects of what we may now perceive as beauty weren’t a product of some high artistic ideals but of mammon. Their paired down style as much a reflection of the need to cut corners as to any greater ideals. The Georgian terrace’s simple rhythm and repetition are a reflection of their origin in space saving, journeyman pattern books and mass production plaster moulds.

Also they aren't always a testament to great craftsmanship as their build quality is shoddy and only vast sums of money being thrown at them have kept them in good order. I know from having to help maintain a grade one listed Queen Anne building how bad their workmen where, in fact I don't know how the west was won as all the cowboys were busy building London!

Also many of the most beautiful and acclaimed modern buildings, (for instance Miers Van de Rohr’s Barcelona pavilion) take their antecedence from classical architecture but are modern and therefore ugly in Scruton’s eyes.

Also what about the Gothic which is fundamentally at odds with the symmetry and order of classical buildings and are even based on different rules of proportion etc. Pugin the great advocate of the gothic loathed Classism for its ungodly paganism and lack of local distinctiveness.

Also to dismiss “form following function” is nonsense. Many of the aspects of buildings which Scruton would praise and find beautiful are products of function. Ancient hammer beamed barns seen now as temples of agrarian beauty where built for function to enclose as much space as cheaply and easily as possible. Their dimensions dictated by the materials as much as anything. Also many of the modern buildings that have failed have done so because they weren’t designed well for their function and so weren’t valued and so weren’t cared for. The modern buildings (e.g. the royal festival hall) that have met their functional needs of their users have been cherished, improved and maintained. Those that were poorly designed have rightly been torn down. Oh and Georgian terraces were great if you didn’t have to carry buckets of coal up 8 flights of stairs or lug gallons of water from the kitchen to fill your master’s bath.

Also his reference to the inherent beauty of nature is flawed as he was stood in an English field the product of centuries of human inventions and manipulation (he was leaning on a strangely faux rusticated fence). Also his bland assumption that modern art isn't interested in nature or the beauty there in is nonsense. It was interesting he avoided Picasso who did much to reveal the beauty of nature. There are many modern artists who make works of great sublime beauty which are based on the natural world. It was interesting that he chose not to show any of Damian Hurst’s spot paintings which in their paired down order and colour palette hold a great beauty and are steeped in classical ideals.

Also he mocked the Kitschness of Jeff Koon’s work but then showed some god-awful kitsch religious church art and interiors. Also he mentioned the desecration of beauty by atheist modern art forgetting that most of the desecration of religious beauty and art was done by Christians.

It also wasn’t mentioned in the film that some of the most spiritual places I have ever been in are those designed by modernists, their very lack of ornament focussing you mind on the sublime. He also sidestepped the battle in art between the protestant ideals of paired down simplicity and the Catholic etc love of baroque ornament. Showing the pearly white of Canova’s sculptures but not the painted gory works popular in Spanish churches.

I thought he might of have had something with poetry but chose to use the most beautiful of mediums only to attack lust forgetting that many of greats poets have been obsessed with lust especially when young. The poets he chose being some fairly anaemic characters.

In fact lust is basis of many great paintings, Caravaggio, Picasso, Hockney, Rembrandt etc the longing and lust in the eye of the painter seeping into their pictures. Part of Botticelli’s love for his model stemming no doubt from lust and it’s odd that he depicted the goddess of erotic love as a weirdly de-sexed man/woman hybrid with a deformed stylised body and of course no sexual parts.

Scruton claims painters can find beauty in horror and then shows a highly stylise crucifix which actually looks away from horror and pain and so is untruthful in its depiction. The greatest depictions of the crucifix such as Roger van Weyden’s work that hangs in Prado are beautiful because they are in unflinching and don’t seek to hide us from the reality of a young man nailed to a scaffold or the pain of his grieving mother etc. Scruton likes reality in an old woman reading books but not in a young man butchered on a wood frame.
I’m not going to defend all of modern art (nor would I defend all art in general) but the Chapman brother’s work which depicts hell using airfix style model Nazi soldiers (and which Scruton failed to mention) is a work which stands up with Bosch and Brueghel in its depiction of human cruelty and chaos and yet is transcendent and beautiful.

I thought it was shame he chose to focus on music in last 10 minutes as here he was on stronger ground. But even then sidestepped the problem that the Chinese for instance use a different tuning to us and one which many western ears find discordant and ugly. And also that many minimal modern pieces of music hold beauty and transcendence he would claim for the piece that he played in the film.

I think this was the problem with the film in that he doesn’t know enough about modern art and so chose the obvious and not always representative to mock and dismiss it.

Oh and also he dismissed humour something that all great art has some element of. Sarah Lucas work uses humour to attack the ugliness of the depiction in particular of women but also perversely for Scruton also uses the aesthetics and proportions of classical art while doing so.

Oh and he really shot himself in foot with that guy Stoddard (?) a chippy maker of kitsch sculptures with his fictional tales of art school shit smeared calf chopping.

Scruton central platonic idea that nature is inherently good is flawed. He never really showed how man fits into this ideal, are we outside nature or part of it. If were a part of nature surely anything we do is natural and therefore beautiful. If however we are outside nature well nothing man does is natural and therefore can never be beautiful.

I do share his belief that beauty can be transcendent and is a goal in itself and that seeking it is good for us. I just don’t believe it only lies in his muddled world of faux Georgian towns, marbled camp side chapels and glum classical music.
I think if you can you should also see Mathew Collins films which showed the beauty in modern art without dismissing the beauty of previous generations.