#136 Why Did The World Get So Ugly? - Alain de Botton

29:40Alain de Botton:We kind of, we know about this stuff without even knowing that we know. And that's the beautiful thing about it. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. I think it's contextually relevant as well.

30:20Like you're talking about these principles. And I was thinking, well, there are some buildings that don't do that, that I like, like the Empire State Building. It's pretty utilitarian all the way up. But it's in New York. And I have sometimes thought, you know, I'm sure the Pyramids of Giza are very beautiful. I've never seen them. I'm sure they're wonderful. But if you were to pick one up and place it in the city of London. We would probably decry it as an example of these horrible sort of modern architectural trends of brutalism and sort of abstract architectural sort of uninventiveness. So I think it sort of depends where it's at.

30:50Alain de Botton:Yes, and that's one of the fascinating things about architecture, that we, on the whole, we like local architecture. We don't like local phones or local bicycles. I mean, somebody said, you know, this is an Austrian bicycle. You think, well, I don't really like, I mean, I just want a nice bicycle, et cetera. But we like the spirit of the place in some ways to be reflected. And that's why many architects have traditionally spoken about when you pick up the soil in an area, what color is the soil? And can that be reflected in the color of the buildings? And you get that in many traditional Italian hilltop villages.

31:25Alain de Botton:But also if you go to Edinburgh, it's a certain kind of gray. And that gray is of the stone and the soil. And so it's pleasing when something responds to the locality. It's pleasing to know that there's a difference between place A and place B, that there's something that's, you know, honoring the distinctive features of a place. If you're by water, is there something that's honoring the fact that you're by water, etc., etc.? And many settlements that are by water are very colourful. It's quite intriguing. Yeah. Because the sea is very monotonous. Very, very monotonous. And so I think there's an impulse when you've got a huge expanse of utter, sort of totally coherent visual surface to vary things enormously.

32:11Alain de Botton:So there's a kind of, often what we're searching for in architecture is balance. When the landscape is pulling one way, we want to pull it another. you know if you go to switzerland what's wonderful when you're in a very rugged extremely raw sort of place um where you know the human body feels quite fragile and at risk is that the buildings are really pulling you towards safety and solidity and there's a you know there's an extra um sense of reassurance from the fact the door is heavy and shuts without everything but if you're in the caribbean um uh you know remember the architect oliver messel who did these houses where there are no windows and everything's open and the structure is very, very light, that's again, you know, working with the climate to, you know, to provide a coherent response to a place.

33:00Alain de Botton:That's what you want from architects. Yeah, I think there's one principle of aesthetic influence and influence on a person's mood and their interpretation of the the vibe of an overall place. It's also become far too universalized, which is often just completely ignored in conversations like these. It's a bit of a sort of elephant in the room, because it is literally invisible. I'm talking about music. I have a whole thing about this. The other day, we went for dinner the other day, and we sat down and ordered a Diet Coke, and I insisted, I made us get up, pay the bill for the Coke, and go somewhere else, because of the music that they were playing.

33:43I'm not like a snob or anything. It depends who you ask, I suppose. But if I'm in a nice French restaurant and you sort of put some effort in and you're dressed up and you're coming up, maybe you're on a date or something. And you think about the amount of effort that goes in to designing this restaurant, how long they spent on the wallpaper, the different colors and the different light, the furniture agonizing. And then finally, when it was complete, they're like, you know what this needs? some Dua Lipa exactly yeah that's that's what will really sort of complete this that to me is probably it's when you said earlier about all these buildings sort of shouting and competing for space that's literally happening all the time but at least when I go past the BT tower I'm afforded the small mercy of being able to look the other way yeah music yeah here's a here's a

34:30Alain de Botton:tip that I've learned because I like you have done this and you can't um generally if you say in restaurants, could you turn down the music? They'll say no. The manager likes it, etc. People like it, etc. So the thing to do for any viewers is to say that you have got a medical complaint, that you've got a disability, and that you may be fragile, you may have a psychotic episode because of the music. And it could actually be true. I mean, it's fascinating. In the UK, if you order any dish, they'll go, have you got any allergies? And we understand allergies. We understand that you can be allergic to something, but the music is not one of them.

35:08Alain de Botton:And why not stretch our definition? But one thing I want to talk about is here we are in this environment, and it's got a very particular decor. Look at this armchair, look at the carpet, the fireplace, et cetera. And one of the really interesting questions is why do people have the taste they do? Because there are real differences of taste. Somebody will think that this living room, its library, is really nice looking, and others won't. And a really interesting question to ask yourself is why why why do some people think this is home this is good and others go so for example i don't like this decor at all i hope you don't mind someone's getting fired i know no no no it's him that's getting it okay i don't know in the carpets you know yeah the fireplace etc now i you see i have a friend who loves this kind of decor yeah and and he and i often talk about it and our differences so he grew up in very unsteady circumstances in glasgow uh in which is a very brutal town when he was growing up in the 70s and he was growing up in a in a brutalized sort of space he loves a touch of old-fashioned english aristocratic charm he just absolutely goes for it i think so so he's quite scared of a simple danish chair or a you know unadorned thing because that's a little close to the kind of austerity and bleakness of the sort of glasgow modernism that he grew up with and suffered under um for me i said i've had i've got a completely different upbringing i grew up in switzerland uh which is the home of kind of tasteful modernism and good quality modernism i grew up in a concrete apartment building that was amazing uh and i loved it.

36:54Alain de Botton:I love it. The walls were bare concrete, but beautiful bare-faced concrete in the 70s. And windows that were large and simple, and there was no decoration, and the furniture was in a way utilitarian, but good utilitarian. And then when I was a boy, I came to the UK and went to boarding school. I was sent to a boarding school that looked half like this and half like a military barrack, but the headmaster's study would have looked like this. And I thought, I hate this place. There's no love here. There's no kindness here. There's no generosity. I'm terrified of this environment. When I look at a chair like this, I'm immediately thinking people who are not very nice.

37:29Alain de Botton:I'm thinking of Brexit. I might not like the person who likes this chair. And so the reason I'm mentioning going to this autobiography which I'm asked about is just that it's a way of understanding taste and the way that it has real roots in people's past. This isn't an argument for saying, well, everything goes. In that case, let's just have chaos. But But it's a way of just trying to understand. A really good question to say to somebody is, what are you afraid of? What's missing from your life? And trying to understand people's aesthetics through an idea of compensation. That what we love in art is very often a mirror of what we're lacking or not having sufficient doses of inside our lives.

38:13Alain de Botton:So, you know, somebody who wants a lot of dark colors, rich colors, a lot of drama going on, their greatest fear might be deadness. stillness, disappearing into a void. Somebody who is craving symmetry, order, simplicity, a reduction of stimuli is probably going nuts from anxiety and over stimulation. So we need different things. And that's why we thrill sometimes to different things. I don't think this means that anything goes. I don't think that at all. But I think it helps to explain why, even when choosing a holiday destination, some people will go, Latin America, that's my thing. And others will go, Helsinki, that's my thing.

38:54Alain de Botton:It's what's missing in you. And what are you in danger of suffocating from? What are you in danger of an excess of? There's a wonderful German theorist called Wilhelm Wöringer, who in the early 20th century tried to build a theory of taste. And he precisely built it on this notion of compensation. And he argued that the very rich styles of the Islamic world was an attempt to counterbalance desert life. That the richness of, let's say, an Arabian rug was a response to the wastes of Arabia. It's a playful, interesting, intriguing kind of thing. If you want to know what an age feels like it's missing, look at what its taste is.

39:40Alain de Botton:So, for example, we live in a highly regulated bureaucratic society. An artist like Damien Hirst goes down really well with bankers. So the financial elite are really thrilled to Damien Hirst. Why? What's the relationship? Well, imagine if your life is operating in a certain kind of emotional pitch, emotional register. Along comes a bad boy who's breaking the rules and is creating a certain kind of drama, etc. You're so far from that. You've got so little of that in your life. You grab onto it with two hands and you might love it with a certain intensity of somebody who's leading maybe a quieter, more emotionally balanced life might not feel needed.

40:23Alain de Botton:of. So always ask oneself, you know, why are you craving this thing rather than another thing? Favorite artist of mine is Agnes Martin, an American minimalist artist, very full of mental illness, unfortunately, and a very, very difficult life. Her work is just a repetition of certain minimal form. For me, beautiful. And she was obviously compensating for the fragmentation of her own mind by creating these very beautiful geometric shapes. I'm not on a good day as far down the road of mental unwellness as she is, touch wood, but I understand that slope and I thrill to it because it's art for the fragile mind.

41:10Alain de Botton:So as I say, making the same point, it's good to ask yourself always, what's missing in your life? where are you mentally to try and understand taste these things are very connected yeah it's a little bit like what we seek in like romantic partners oh yeah i mean it's a similar kind of thing like the you know the sort of steady sort of you know respectable man who falls for the for the bad girl or vice versa the bad oh i know he's no good for me but you know it's there's something attractive about it because it kind of balances out what might be a a quite strict regimented existence There's something sort of exciting about it, but also something comforting about that.

41:44But it seems like definitely not universal, at least. I mean, I'm thinking when you talk about the fragmented mind and what it produces, you know, like my mind goes to like Goya and sort of painting this horrifying image of probably Saturn devouring a slightly older version of the child to this sort of toddler figure, like biting its head off. And that is this sort of frantic, sort of horrifying image that is representative of what is probably quite a frantic mind. I mean, he painted it on his dining room wall and it wasn't supposed to be seen by anybody, right? Yeah. Whereas, and I could sort of psychoanalyze him, I could say, and that's because, you know, he was feeling so crazy and fragmented.

42:26Whereas if he'd had sort of drawn a beautiful picturesque landscape, I could say, well, it's because he had this sort of fragmented and terrifying and anxious inner world that he wanted to compensate by sort of surrounding himself by this landscape painting.

42:43Alain de Botton:Look, I think you raise a really good point. We could get stuck in this in a good way. I think the most powerful artists of, let's say, serenity and simple beauty are those where one feels that there's a pull in the other direction. So if you think of Wilhelm Hammershoy, fantastic Danish painter who paints these very still interiors and very still landscapes, the reason why it's not just boring is you feel, as a viewer, the opposite of what he's showing you. He's showing you stillness, but you know, you just sense it, that there's something else. Think of Van Gogh's flowers, his irises. The reason why those flowers are so extraordinary is that you know that this is coming from, this is not just a pretty flower.

43:34Alain de Botton:This is coming from a man who knows hell. And it's because he knows hell that those flowers are so moving and so powerful. so i i would say that even if it looks like it's just a pretty scene if it's impacting you it's likely that the artist had his foot in the other or her foot in the other camp as well yes and that goes both ways because you can also have your interpretation of a painting changed by your knowledge of the the author so john is it john burger or berger i never know how to say that But John Berger famously writes Ways of Seeing. And I talk about this particular example all the time because I think it's like the thing that single-handedly got me interested in talking about any of this.

44:19Which is when he shows this image of Van Gogh's crows in a wheat field. He doesn't tell you who it's by. I mean, you can see it's probably a Van Gogh, whatever. And he says, you know, just look at this and see what you think about it. And then turn the page. And you turn the page and it's the same image, except now it's got this caption. This is the last image Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. which it may not actually have been but it doesn't matter because instantly you're like oh was this was this him trying to sort of imply that he he was seeking this freedom represented by the birds whereas before genuinely i look at it and i go like it's another i'm not a big fan of van goff i'm like you know it's cool it's great it's it's like it's it's neat like i like some of it don't like but there's there's there's so much of it as well that when i see a sort of another van goff i'm like sometimes i'm like cool but with something like that i'm like yeah you know whatever but but that sort of caption has changed it yeah look i mean it's

45:12Alain de Botton:you know it's a almost comedic side of us human beings that we are very susceptible to as it were frames being put on things and suggestions of where value lies and of what things mean yeah i mean we know there's experiments with wine you tell somebody some really expensive wine people go, that's a lovely wine. You tell them it costs nothing. Think of a fried egg and caviar. If you gave a child a fried egg and caviar and you said, what's nicer? The child probably would go, the fried egg. Take an adult and you say, this is an amazing thing, caviar, it costs thousands of pounds per millimeter, et cetera.

45:52Alain de Botton:And this is a fried egg and it costs absolutely nothing you know and i think we're always having to rediscover our own genuine feelings and you know maybe in some areas frighteningly there isn't such a thing as a totally authentic feeling we we waver and we're we're comedic on a good day we call a call us sweet and um otherwise we're gullible and miserable do you think there's such a thing as as fake art and i mean something quite specific here like have you seen i haven't there's a movie called f for fake i can't remember who directed it um some famous director um i've forgotten who it is but basically it's about a a real life person although it's fictionalized who made a living uh forging paintings right by famous painters and he was sort of a master a painter and he could make it look like a perfect monet or whatever and of course you can sort of imagine purchasing this painting and going like i'm a private collector that will go wonderfully in my living room And then finding out 10 years later that the painting you hadn't adored so much was not really painted by Monet.

46:58Does it become less beautiful?

47:02Alain de Botton:No. I mean, here I feel quite strongly. I think we've become obsessed by the idea, essentially for financial reasons, that the original work of art is important. We don't think about this in other areas. We don't think about it in terms of tables. A table is a good table. you know whether it's the first table that looked like that or the hundred millionth table we don't care about provenance we don't care about this in terms of books i mean a very few people want the first edition but most people are like it's it's going to be good if it's just printed i don't care that it was the first or the hundredth or whatever it's just the same well you say care about a different thing don't they the person who wants the first print and the person who wants to read the book yes exactly and so i think that in art what i would love and it really is to do with the financial system is that we accept reproductions and the role of reproduction.

47:53Alain de Botton:I mean, this is where people thought that we were headed in the 19th century. People thought we were headed towards an era where art could be reproduced on a mass scale and that everybody could have wonderful works of art on their walls. And in fact, what's happened is the opposite. It's become rarer and rarer and people are obsessed by provenance and it's got to be, you know, absolutely by, you know, Hockney or by, you know, Picasso, etc., rather than it's just a reproduction. And so the poster has a very, very low status. The reproduction is seen as ridiculous. To my mind, museum gift shops should be selling the entire corpus of what they've got on the wall in high quality reproductions, and that those things should be seen as no less valid than anything else?

48:42Alain de Botton:I mean, of course, it's good to have the first one, but like we have the first copy of Ulysses or whatever, let's keep it in a library. But the rest of us, what are we doing? Neglecting the talent of certain people and simply reducing it to a postcard. Yeah. I think that photography has in many ways kind of at least changed and maybe sort of ruined our interaction with art. And I don't mean because photos compete with art. I mean, photographs of art pieces because like you know i could i could put a picture of the mona lisa on screen right now which maybe maybe my editor will do if he's feeling inclined i can say look you're looking at the mona lisa yeah and you could say no i'm not i'm looking at a reproduction of the mona lisa that's being i'm looking at it through a screen it's like well i've been to the louvre and i was looking at it through a screen as well like three inches of bulletproof you know perspex or whatever and most people who are there are actually looking at it through two screens because they spend the few freshest moments taking a photo of it.

49:39So they're looking at it through more screens than a viewer is now.

49:42Alain de Botton:But really, the answer is that we can create copies of the Mona Lisa that are absolutely excellent. And why wouldn't we value them? Why wouldn't we create... And these are seen as kitsch. And on the whole, we don't have access to them. I mean, there's a painter I really like called Caspar David Friedrich, wonderful artist and i thought god i love a casper david freezer in my house i looked up online and you know they start at i think you know 700 million i said oh slightly outside the budget and then but you can buy a poster i don't really want to buy a poster can't i just get someone to paint it and you know there are people in china who will do it for you but it's slightly sort of black market and there's you know the whole thing's slightly dodgy it's not you know it's it's a little tricky but um why not why not uh honor the talent of fantastic artists and look you know we started by talking about architecture why don't we repeat patterns of architecture this is what in the great days of architecture people just did the same thing again and again and no one thought that was a problem yeah um no one even knew who was the first person who did that style it just worked and you just did it again and again.

50:52Alain de Botton:And nowadays, it's like, no, it's a singular building. I mean, I pass buildings in London now. There are a lot of buildings going up in East London, for example. Honest, simple, beautiful bits of apartment buildings, civic buildings, churches, etc. And I think, wow, it's kind of nice, you know, unshowy, etc. And I think, why don't we just roll that out? If the whole of London were just made out of that, that would look great. People go, oh, no, no, no, no, that's a one-off. It's got to be a one-off. Why a one-off? The Georgians just repeated it again and again. If something works. I mean, imagine making a mobile phone and thinking, no, it's a one-off.

51:27Alain de Botton:Sorry. It's going to cost 100 million pounds because it's a one-off mobile phone. The whole point of mass manufacture is you reproduce quality. And we've forgotten about that in relation to art and architecture. Yeah. And I think if you were forced to design a building that you knew was going to be replicated, you'd probably put a bit more thought into universalizing principles of beauty. Exactly. I think that's fair enough. But then when I think about this concept of fake art, because I'm fully with you on that, right? Like if it looks like a painting, it's a painting. I mean, it's like, it's almost as if you can imagine the opposite as well.

52:02Like there's that painting on the wall over there still, it's just like a portrait of someone. If I just told you like, oh, we've just discovered that like, you know, Rembrandt painted that. Is it like, now it's more beautiful? Does it like suit the room better? Does it make you feel a different way is because we're obsessed with celebrity.

52:19Alain de Botton:Well, it's financial. It's a financial thing. It's impressive. We understand finances and it's good, but it's just been overlaid. Financial speculation has been overlaid onto the art world. There's always been a relationship between money. Which is like the one place it doesn't belong. Well, it's particularly unfortunate because it gets in the way. It means that really lovely things don't get the reach that they should do. They're still throttled. I mean, the very fact that photography, which was again supposed to be the medium that would open things up. What happened to photography? Special editions, numbered editions.

52:51Alain de Botton:Candida Hoffa will make a wonderful thing. Oh, but there's only 20 of them in the world. Why 20? Why can't you just press print 100 million times? I mean, she'll make less money, poor Candida Hoffa, but it'd be great for everybody else. Why can't we press print and find other ways of compensating artists? Why does photography have to fall in with a pre-modern system of distribution. Why can't we reward artists in other ways other than by throttling their production? Probably because scarcity breeds value. Sure. Even if it shouldn't. Absolutely. But let's try and create value in other ways. Let's try and reward these photographers in other ways other than by saying the only way you can make a living is by making five editions of these and not six or a hundred thousand.

53:35It's the same thing with furniture. I can tell the difference between an Ikea mdf table and like an oak you know coffee table or something but like there's a table in front of us and it looks real it looks nice but like genuinely that could cost like 50 quid or it could cost one and a half million and i just wouldn't know and i also genuinely don't care in a way that i kind of do with art in a way that i'm not i wonder if it's because there's this fear of tackiness like for example not a trick question do you like the eiffel tower do you think it's pretty yeah there's also an eiffel tower in nevada in the united states of america right on the las vegas strip if i asked you if that i don't know if you've seen it i don't know if you've been there if you've seen that like do you think that's pretty because in a way it really is just kind of the same building slightly smaller reproduced and yet we kind of want to say it's tacky i don't like it it's kind of ugly even though it literally speaking it's the same thing Caesar's Palace is also in Vegas.

54:40In a way, Vegas should be the most beautiful place on Earth, because it follows all of the principles.

54:45Alain de Botton:Yeah. Well, look, I get your point, but I think we can hold steady, because I agree, it's a terrifying moment. We think, oh God, Vegas. First of all, if you actually look at the way in which things are assembled in Vegas, they're assembled really badly. They don't actually look very good. You go up to it, because it was very cheaply built. So there's that. There's also the idea of unity and mixture. Part of the problem with Las Vegas is it doesn't really know what it is, and therefore it's a mix of everything. Now, there is actually a certain there is a beauty in Las Vegas. So, you know, the architect Robert Venturi famously made a case for Las Vegas as having its hodgepodge, you know, it's like a sort of mood when you think the buffet is okay.

55:30Alain de Botton:Let's just go with the buffet. Let's celebrate multiplicity. Also, it's surrounded by desert, which helps. That's still that stilling environment it's like here is a little moment a human orgy in the midst of deadness you know nature is not yielding anything there's not a single plant around but but but we're celebrating light and you know um so you know one can have time for for Las Vegas even have time for the Eiffel Tower but I think you appreciate the Eiffel Tower in Vegas in a different way it's sort of like look at this lustful greed that has produced that sucked in from all corners of the world, something that is, you know, look, it's like every now and then, you know, there's a space for a garish building, a garish piece of clothing, an outrageous spirit, et cetera, even piece of, you know, food, et cetera.

56:22Alain de Botton:There is, we need that sometimes. We need that within a context. So yeah, Las Vegas has its charms. Definitely has its charms. You know, like the Eiffel Tower works, I think. And there were a lot of protests. Because you can imagine being in Paris at the time and they want to stick this like largest building since like Lincoln Cathedral in the middle of Paris. And it seems like, but it works because it sort of stands on its own. But a moment ago, we were talking about like, you know, if it works, why don't we just repeat it over and over again? So why don't we sort of have 15 different Eiffel Towers all sort of plotted across the city?

56:56That would be horrifying. And yet, what's the skyscraper just across from the Eiffel Tower, like the only one in the middle of Paris? Montparnasse. Montparnasse. Montparnasse. That's a similar thing. It's this singular experiment. It's tool building. And yet that one, I think is disgusting and horrible and ugly.

57:16Alain de Botton:So again, people panic at this point and go, oh god, so we're never going to be able to make progress of the art. People lose their nerve. They're like, hang on, I like the Eiffel Tower. I hate the Montparnasse. originally people hated Eiffel Tower now we like it Turmopanas they originally hated it so maybe now it's good and people panic let's not panic there are really good ways in which you can proceed the reason why the Turmopanas is ugly and will always be ugly and will never be loved follows very identifiable aesthetic principles its shape is very unpleasing it doesn't taper whenever something's tall it should be tapering there's a reason why we like rockets um we like that the top of a very tall building is smaller because it's aerodynamic as it were so even if the building doesn't isn't going to take off anywhere we like the suggestion of velocity uh upper building to manas doesn't do it its material is a very unyielding gray concrete um formed unilaterally right across the whole thing um it's got no proper approach i mean you know we can go on for many hours there's solid reasons why this tower is a horror.

58:25Alain de Botton:And we mustn't lose our nerve. I was about to say, but I raise you the first version of the World Trade Center in New York. The replacement world or the actual one. The original one, the first, the two, where people used to say, oh, they're the boxes that the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building came in. They thought they were disgusting and horrible, but I think they're beautiful. But I was about to say that, And when I thought then about taking one of them and sort of plopping it in the middle of Paris, suddenly I'm not so keen. And I think, I guess, whenever someone says something, not just you in this conversation, but on this show, in that seat, my favorite thing is to just try to come up with a counterexample of what they're saying.

59:13And I think I can, but only if I'm insensitive to context. And architecture is all about context. That stuff about the soil. That stuff about the sort of soul. of the place.

59:24Alain de Botton:We know it. I mean, something could be a beautiful song, but doesn't mean you need to hear it everywhere at all times. You know, sometimes you can say, that's a fantastic song, but it's coming at the wrong moment. Just as an ingredient in cooking, you could go, you know, I really love butter, but that doesn't really work with this thing. So we need to match ingredients. And there's no, you know, many, many ingredients work, but they have their time and place. Yeah. I'm the most, I mean, I think going into a restaurant and hearing, I like Dua Lipa, you know that's right but hearing it there is about as jarring as going into like a nightclub because you want to sort of get down some electro and they're playing back or someone giggling at a funeral or whatever i mean it's just we you know we exist in context and and so something that works really well in one area and something that is really good in one area it might not be good in another we understand this instinctively as you say with music with laughter with social codes and and it's no different with architectural codes there's a time and a place i think that's that's true and and probably universally true and and almost obviously true yeah but i think that what is it they say you know the the smartest people just remind you of obvious things that you have forgotten how do you say that i think that's true i agree and and you know we do talking of snobbery we do tend to have a view that um intelligent things have to come in pretty incomprehensible packages.

1:00:47Alain de Botton:There's a role for something that sounds very simple. Again, I'll link it back to architecture. Some of the most beautiful buildings, it looks like they're just simple and obvious. There's been a lot of thought to create that apparent simplicity and obviousness. Yeah. Well, Alain Abdon, thank you for your time. It's been fun. Thank you.