What is it about the left and their fascination with ugliness? Placing Lord Mandelson to one side, you’ve probably noticed that in so many areas of life, radical progressives appear to revel in anything that deviates from traditional notions of beauty whether in art, music, literature or architecture. Punk chose shrill discordance to rail against conservative values while left-leaning playwrights such as Jude Kelly have taken great pleasure in coarsening the works of Shakespeare to fit a narrow political agenda.
Architecture has become a particularly divisive cultural lightning rod. Take the recent kerfuffle around the decision to bestow listed status on London’s Southbank Centre, famously dubbed ‘Britain’s ugliest building’ in a 1967 Daily Mail poll. Visiting the oppressive, gloom-laden monolith today, with its confusing, labyrinthine layout and unwelcoming, inaccessible interior it’s easy to see why. In 2017 some bright spark decided it would be a good idea to paint the exterior stairwell a poisonous shade of yellow, further emphasising the grimness of the rain-stained concrete.
A predictable standoff between traditionalists and the brutalists immediately followed the Department for Culture Media and Sport’s controversial verdict. Led by Heritage Minister Baroness Twycross, the listing marked a significant shift from previous Conservative administrations, which had rejected the request six times over 35 years.
Catherine Croft, the director of the Twentieth Century Society said that ‘brutalism has finally come of age’ adding ‘This is a victory over those who derided so-called “concrete monstrosities” and shows a mature recognition of a style where Britain led the way.’ Does Croft truly believe the Southbank Centre to be a thing of beauty? Others quick to praise the Southbank’s Soviet aesthetic are, predictably, Sadiq Khan and Samira Ahmed.
In his 2014 Radio 4 A Point of View address Roger Scruton described modern art as being born from adesire to destroy kitsch. ‘Art must show modern life as it is. Ornament is crime, declared the architect Adolf Loos, and all those baroque facades that line the streets of Vienna, encrusted with meaningless knobs and curlicues, are so many denials of the world in which we live.’ I remember witnessing at first hand the old Eastern Bloc’s hatred of the sublime while staying at a friend’s home in former East Berlin. From the outside the building looked like just another hideous concrete apartment block designed for the lumpenproletariat. But behind the fake anti-bourgeois façade lay a gloriously decorative 19th century Wilhelminian house. Such wilful desecration felt like the worst kind of mass derangement. How could such a thing have ever happened?
Perhaps it goes back to Thomas Hobbes’ adage about life being ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Maybe the modern mindset isn’t so very different from that of the old Soviet Union after all. The avant-garde artist’s revolutionary zeal for denigrating the sublime and tearing down established orders perfectly aligns with hard left thinking. When everything is viewed through the prism of tyranny, even architecture must fall in line.
We are about to witness the wholesale uglification of what’s left of the public realm
The left will argue that postmodernism challenges oppressive norms whereas romanticism belongs on biscuit tins or in the minds of a deluded middle-class drunk on nostalgia and philistinism. Declare a love for painted ladies and oriel windows and your average architecture student will assume you are being ironic. Valuing beauty for its own sake is no longer taught in arts establishments. According to a friend who worked at a top London art school, such old-fashioned notions were actively discouraged.
As a consequence, I fear we are about to witness the wholesale uglification of what’s left of the public realm. I foresee a barrage of characterless ‘units’ masquerading as houses and colossal hamster cage apartment blocks lacking in human scale.
And so I urge you not to believe the radical progressives when they tell you that beauty is for the birds. We all have an instinct for the sublime and know it when we see it. The Southbank Centre is not beautiful and we know it. Just as they did with diversity, the left wants to rub your nose in ugliness. Don’t allow them the pleasure.
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