“The specific element of each type of beauty comes from the passions, and just as we each have our particular passions, so we have our own beauty [...] we have only to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day.” – Baudelaire.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we have resigned to take it tragically. The ruins become us, we yield to devolution, to our petty morbidities. Everywhere we encounter the vulgarity of our resignation; as though there is no longer any life left in anything; and we can but only polish these nuggets of excrement until we face the great leveler herself.
On the surface, it appears as though most are wanting in spirit and thought; secular modernity’s stripping of tradition, bound up in Ezra Pound’s emphasis on making it new, has led us farther into the marshes of delirium and excess. It appears that in the effort of achieving novelty and originality, we deprive ourselves of the appreciation of prior forms.
In simpler words, it has become a matter of surpassing tradition through critique and unmasking, of laying bare a false antagonist, as opposed to broaching the origins of design with recognition. Beauty, as we are told, is already an arbitrary and outdated concept the moment we attempt to take stock of it; it is to be forgotten in its appearance. Is it any wonder, then, that there are those who wish to reclaim the conditions for beauty as an antidote to the new? And moreover, that theirs is an appeal bound up in absolute forms and rejections of the differential?