Beauty, Whatever That Is

There's no refuge for arts except what we make ourselves. Artists are useless to the counter-elite.

When someone posted online an image of an apartment in Texas, I was struck by the banality of it. Yet it also I was fascinated. I know (because I am as susceptible as anyone else) that we seek meaning in things when we know of extraneous significant context. So, a commonplace statement can be given huge weight because it is a person’s last words. A child’s drawing can become precious and scrutinised if it is the first extant picture by a future great artist. We tend to frame things in terms of metrics that are both easy to understand but also essentially quotidian: the first, the last, the oldest, the largest, the smallest, the most valuable, the best preserved, the only surviving and so on.

The apartment photograph was no holy site or murder scene. It was the apartment of Elon Musk, tech-billionaire and CEO of Tesla automobiles, X social media site and a rocketry firm. As one of the world’s richest men, he could have bought or had designed for him a palace or any manner of wild or astonishing building. Instead the view was of an open-plan kitchen-living room with a wood-laminate floor and metal chairs at a small dining table. A framed poster and printed canvas hang in the kitchen. The only unexpected touches were the katana and the ornamental rocket objet d’art. Without the sword, the photograph could have been any student rental apartment. Indeed, it could have been an estate-agent photograph advertising it.

It seems that Musk tends not to have a permanent home and for a period slept in an office at the Tesla factory. From the photograph it seems as though he spends little time there and attaches little importance to his immediate surroundings. If it had not been labelled as Musk’s home (or one of his abodes) then the photograph would have attracted no comment and no scrutiny. It is the epitome of anonymous, with its contents what one would expect in a furnished rental home, chosen for utility, affordability and absence of individual touch. It is the view you send relatives when they ask what your holiday rental apartment looks like.

I am no opponent of austerity; my preference is for simplicity, if not minimalism. So, I do not fault anyone for choosing interior décor that is plain, unornamented and understated. I would not expect ostentation or peculiarity from a rich man. In some ways, it speaks well of the man that he lives in his everyday life in a modest way. But what did catch my eye is that it lacks any discrimination. To live simply does not entail banality. It is possible (without too much trouble) to buy a beautifully minimal set of chairs and table. One can acquire a coffee table that offsets the wall and floor colours. It does not need to be ornamented, rare or custom made. What it does require is some taste and a willingness to put in a touch of effort.

Now, again, Musk clearly does not have much time or patience for such things but what his choices – or more properly, his absence of choices – reveals is an indifference to taste. William the Sculptor commented that he had seen that Musk and one of his children had admired Bernini’s St Theresa in St Paul’s Cathedral, Rome, which implies Musk is capable of aesthetic appreciation. But while Bernini’s sculpture (and its placement, plinth, pillars and canopy) is beautiful, it is also a tour de force of theatricality; it is also large, imposing and technically audacious. Musk’s reaction may have been to the overall effect or some effects that we might call secondary ones; ones that contribute to our impressions and the beauty of an object but which are not prerequisites for beauty. He may also have been responding to its aura; as an acknowledged masterpiece of Western art.

That someone might find beauty in utility or nature or in experiences that are non-visual is understandable but Musk is also the owner of a car company, a man who has to make decisions that involve choosing on the basis of assessing the attractiveness or appropriacy of vehicles, interiors and components. Yet when it came to choosing décor for a place that he had complete control over, he accepted the default setting. Looking at the interior, it seems he did not even employ a professional buyer to offer him some bespoke combinations.

This indifference towards beauty even at the most basic level seems a commonality between captains of industry today. Whenever one sees how Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and Musk (the Big Tech elite) dress and live, one is struck by the lack of taste. Even bad taste – an eccentric preference or wilful independence – would be a relief but there is nothing. Jobs did have an aesthetic sensibility that one finds in Apple products. He often came into conflict with colleagues due to his perfectionism and his stubborn attachment to views about the design of products. Yet, on the whole, we find a profound indifference to beauty that the ancients would have considered a deficiency. The ancients admired men who did not become slaves to luxury (a Persian weakness, linked to indolence); great men served through ennobling their cities with artistic treasures, even if they did not own or even understand such things themselves.

Beauty is a quality that we recognise in sensations we experience due to external stimuli which we find fitting or apt, in ways that we often associate with truthfulness and goodness, which sometimes have an improving or uplifting quality. Gentlemen of the Enlightenment were expected to go on the Grand Tour, which would expose them to great art and architecture and make them familiar with the important achievements of civilisations ancient and recent. It was a part of the education of a complete man, even if he would become a press baron, railway magnate or coal tycoon, quite distant to the fine arts. Some would go on to be benefactors of the arts and collectors in their own right. Noblesse oblige extended to supporting new art that others would appreciate even if the great man himself was personally indifferent or ambivalent. The libraries, churches and art galleries they would found would pay homage to the arts and educate their people.

One of the central beliefs of the National Futurists (drawing heavily on Curtis Yarvin’s interpretation of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history) was that the captains of industry could be encouraged to patronise the arts as in days of yore. Even if Musk, Thiel and Zuckerberg were not men of discernment, they would at least want to be considered contributors to their era and shape their societies through supporting the arts. These arts would be new and exciting and would reflect the brash new-money, fresh-blood, up-and-at-‘em mentality of self-made men who had taken chances in business and would see the value in sponsoring artists of a similar feisty nature. Those at the cutting edge of technology would recognise kindred spirits in their artist peers.

Even at a utilitarian level, (Yarvin seemed to be arguing) these new Medici would understand the value to a rising counter-culture of accruing intellectual and artistic ballast to bolster their self-interested counter-elite ambitions. Led from the top, driven by ambitious boundary-breaking creators working hand-in-hand with a new elite looking to break away from the woke-liberal culture that infused channels of power, a new Renaissance was on the horizon. The fusion of new tech, AI, Goth culture, punk attitude, political incorrectness, national self-interest and a forward-looking reactionary spirit would propel culture into a new era that would decisively break with the managed decline, blatant absurdity and constricting taste of a failed elite.

That has not happened and I do not see it happening in the future. What I see is a fundamental indifference towards the arts on the part of Big Tech oligarchs and even at lower levels. They do not see the point. The material and political gains just are not immediate enough and without an innate curiosity about beauty and creativity there is a lack of impetus to fund the arts in a serious way. Bezos bought the rights to part of Tolkien’s legacy for his Amazon streaming service only because he thought he could own a franchise that would become the world’s most prestigious and valuable television series, judged on the comparative triumph of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy. Yet he did not have even the essential wit to appoint a creative team that took Tolkien seriously and who would follow Jackson’s formula of making minimal changes for pacing, drama and character development whilst keeping true to the spirit of the source. A business decision was undone by a complete lack of artistic instinct – even if it was just to appoint the appropriate productive personnel.

Perhaps we should be grateful they do not intervene in the fine arts. The horrors they could inflict upon our public squares and national museums might surpass even the worst of what we have now. We have been spared 100-foot titanium statues of mythological figures that resemble diecast figurines, with their reflections needling our eyes miles distant.

The patrons that National Futurists courted have no innate curiosity, taste or seriousness when it comes to the arts. They are incomplete men, uneducated in beauty or culture. And that is fine. However they came to power and in whatever way they run their concerns, they do sufficiently well enough to succeed. Whatever qualities (however ruthless, lucky or well-connected they may be), they are not suited even to delegate a tiny amount of their wealth or influence to serious creators. We can see it in their clothes, in their speech, in their surroundings, in the very fabric of their existence. Whether their deficiencies are due to character or education, we cannot say. Perhaps, tantalisingly, their very success comes about through this absence of completeness, this dearth of intellectual seriousness. The tough, utilitarian character of the counter-elite may be antithetical to the stimulation of finer sentiments. So be it.

None is a Pericles and none deserve a Phidias.