The turner prize is now so ridiculous it might qualify for a turner prize | thearticle

I’m thinking of submitting a recording of this year’s Turner Prize award ceremony as a video installation for the 2020 Turner Prize. The proceedings were absurd and there’s always money to

be made in exploiting the absurd. Provided you do it in absurd ways. Last week’s shortlisted candidates decided that in these times of division, it would be wrong for any one of them to

emerge as in any way more deserving than the other three. So they decided to split the prize. Such is the current orthodoxy in contemporary “art”: that excellence has no place in it. And

when it comes to the Turner they may well, inadvertently, have a point. The Turner is the ritual affirmation by the art establishment that the job of the artist is to reflect, or (better

still) manipulate, the grubby contingencies of this world, rather than to provide any indication that there might be something that transcends it. The manipulation is always in the direction

of the leftist orthodoxy du jour — what counts as “originality” in this context amounts to no more than the fact that those orthodoxies change: what was shocking in 2000 is now mundane in

2019. If Tracey Emin had anticipated the ascendency of the LGBT nonsense, she may well have done the sensible thing, and never got out of that bed. But the real problem with the art

establishment is not that it has become a proxy for certain versions of “right thinking”, but that it is mounting a systematic attack on the role of beauty, both in art and in life. And in

doing this it is not merely irreligious, but anti-religious. Classical theism takes God to be simple in the sense that he cannot be composed of parts, for if he is composed of parts then he

is, in principle, degradable. And if he is degradable then he is finite, and if he is finite he is not God. On this view God does not have properties, he is those properties. God does not

tell the truth, he just is truth; he does not just love, he is love. He doesn’t decide what is beautiful, he is beauty. These are what Aquinas called the convertibles: not properties of God

(because he doesn’t have any) but modes of his being, grasped by us, as though “through a glass darkly”. If we are prepared to be receptive, then they are nevertheless freely given and

genuine disclosures of his nature. The experience of beauty is, on this account, a direct announcement of God’s presence among us. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar put it like

this: “No longer loved or fostered by religion, Beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We

no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.” Balthasar believed that people could be led to an experience of God via an

experience of the beautiful, simply because they are experiences of the same thing. Not everybody can understand the arguments in St Thomas Aquinas’s _Summa Theologiae_ (me included) but

beauty has a more universal call to sanctity. We all know, for example, that music can sometimes speak to us from a different dimension, even if we disagree about what counts as good music.

There is a secular formulation of Balthasar’s point. Beauty is an intrinsic value, it is good in itself, and what we experience when we contemplate the beautiful should not be understood in

merely instrumental ways. It is something we all just know is good for its own sake and not merely because it suits a given political agenda (and an agenda which will change over time in the

way that beauty does not). Totalitarian regimes understand this: that there is, as St Augustine said, a tendency implanted in us in the direction of the transcendent. This is why they

always expunge beauty from the approved art and swamp their victims with kitsch, in invariably forlorn attempts to cancel the natural impulses of the human soul. Not all of art needs to be

beautiful and not all instances of beauty belong to art. But the tendency of the art establishment to disregard the requirements of beauty is a form of aesthetic — and therefore of moral —

vandalism. So, I’m going to submit that video installation for next year’s Turner and if I am successful I can guarantee that I will not be sharing the prize money with anyone. Or certainly

not with anyone connected to the system of fakery that constitutes the world of modern “art”. It will be a secular convertible: from the gullible sponsors of fake art straight into my bank

account.