All art is political, said Orwell. To say otherwise is a political statement. In a time of mass society and mass culture – and amidst 200 years of varying revolutionary sentiment – it’s hard to argue he was wrong. But it would be better had he not said the thing. What starts as a description often ends as a prescription.

Certainly, those in charge of erecting public art believe the sentiment. They subsume the art part completely into the political part, which is why we have Skywhale floating across Canberra and the Cheese Stick that straddles the Tullamarine Highway in Melbourne. These pieces are less expressions of artistic merit than aesthetic terrorism. There is a barely concealed cackle behind them. They like to shock the civilised people in the room, like children who trot out a vile word they’ve learned at dinner. The children, at least, can be given the benefit of the doubt. The same is not true of the art world.

It is obvious that the art world, or that which presents itself as the art world, is not interested in beauty. Instead, it has decided that ends trump means, and thus confess that beauty itself can only ever be a means. For people of such reduced imagination, for whom everything is relative besides the rightness of their own freely chosen relativity, nothing can be done. If we believe another of Orwell’s aphorisms – that beauty is meaningless until it is shared – we might say the same of their commitment to ugliness. They are not content to leave their upside-down Pollock at home. Instead, the constant barrage of manufactured ugliness in our public places is in character not unlike an unwanted sexual advance.

Part of it lies in our collective obsession with individual expression, which cannot broker hierarchy because hierarchy is the father of all evils. This is why the CIA generously funded American abstract expressionist art in the early period of the Cold War. It had to serve as the bottom-up answer to Soviet Realist art. You think you’re into the demos? Now this is being into the demos. Not unlike the funding of the Mujahideen, this one escaped the lab and became its own cultural force. Much of what we take as given, in the age of mass media and mass communication and accordingly mass suffrage, seems to have originated in the brain of an intelligence man somewhere. I am not sure the likes of Banksy would enjoy being regarded as the heirs of a program designed to manipulate minds.

Architecture has suffered similar degeneration. Almost all modern cities look identical, deracinated, and functional, lacking the markers of uniqueness that today stand as monuments to a past that shames us. The 19th and early-20th Century buildings in good maintenance in Sydney and Melbourne stand in stark contrast to their descendants. It is not as though we suddenly forgot how to build beautiful things; we merely didn’t want to any longer. Like artists, architects plunged into the brave new frontier of the post-war order. As Owen Hatherly said in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain:

Brutalist architecture was Modernism’s angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it’s divided between ‘eyesores’ and ‘icons’; fine for the Barbican’s stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

Despite our pretence toward living in a demotic age, no period has allowed a greater stage for the preoccupations of elites than our own, preoccupations that usually have a lot to do with what they think would be good for the people, as opposed to what is in fact good for the people. Here lies the prime problem with modern art and modern architecture: we have ghastly patrons. In the latter case, our patrons are faceless developers who want return on their investment with the lowest overheads possible, who clasp hands with hare-brained designers desperate to stand out by conceiving formlessly novel yet spiritually identical shells. Their god is market forces and a jealous hatred of antiquity, where men did far more with far less. They care not at all what carbon-copy monstrosities they erect, beyond the barest aesthetic standards that are fashionable rather than beautiful, and we ordinary people, by virtue of needing a place to work and live, accepted their bargain.

In the case of our public art, our patrons are too often local councils and government departments.

Bureaucrats are many things, but they are not famous for their human qualities. They are sensitive to trend and fad, as governments are the antithesis of hip. To renew their demotic credentials, they shell out on eyesores. This is the innocent explanation. The other reason is that these types are co-conspirators in undermining the sense of themselves people once had. They do this by instinct, rather than design; the instinct of the postmodern functionary, who believes he has ascended beyond quaint antiquated notions such as beauty, and must unceasingly inflict this upon everybody else. Hence London’s most recent addition, a fat black woman in a blue dress upon Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. If you ever wanted a sculpture to commemorate two centuries of imperial decline and national replacement, that is it.

People Can't Believe What Was Picked to Replace Christian Missionary, Preacher Statues on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth https://t.co/Q0bBhbnhLd

— Trace1984 Deplorable Ohio Patriot Ameica First (@1984_Trace) March 22, 2024

These ghastly patrons are made worse by the fact that, for them, art must be either entertaining or political. It must be entertaining because, with the death of aristocratic high culture, for storytellers or great works of art, market forces are the only patrons left. Every new film is designed to appeal to cretins. It must be political because, in Paul Krugman’s words, everything today is political. It is political because in modern democracies we delude ourselves into believing we all partake in the exercise of power, and so the exercise of power must be expanded to prevail upon everyone. It is why you must stare at loathsome public art as you drive to your Brutalist workplace in a city designed by people better suited to fabricating torture chambers. The death of beauty – proper beauty, not the sort commercialised by advertisers – has gone a long way toward the coarsening of our public lives.