by Daniel Gurpide

Multiculturalism also leads directly to the death of beauty in art. Different cultures have vastly different ideas of beauty. Michelangelo did not produce African masks. Chopin did not write rap or beat on hollow logs. John William Waterhouse and Jackson Pollock inhabited very different inner worlds. In a multicultural society, standards and traditions are abandoned. European standards are necessarily too ‘Eurocentric’; no group may impose its standards on any other—nor even maintain its own traditions for long. In painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and the decorative arts, there is no longer a ‘centre.’ The continuity of thousands of years is broken. There is chaos.

The real danger of art for egalitarians is that it offers ideals and models, and those ideals—in classical European art—are not egalitarian ideals, nor are the models politically correct. If you are trying to prepare students to be rootless, cosmopolitan citizens of the New World Order, you certainly do not want them to come into contact with the undemocratic spirit of Homer or Shakespeare.

From it all, a bland, offensive-to-no-one, make-it-as-cheaply-as-possible artistic ethos invades our lives from every side, coupled with an avant-garde which revels in the equally empty perverse. Again, as we begin to live in a society of ugly people, wherever we look we see ugly paintings, ugly advertisements, ugly clothing, ugly body deformations and decorations, and ugly buildings. A people disconnected from its own traditions of beauty—a people inundated with the bland and ugly, mingled with the weird and trendy and ugly—is sickened and greatly weakened.