That offbeat gothic comedy serial of the 1960s, The Addams Family, would seem to be the last place to look for an understanding of “beauty” capable of withstanding erosion by the cynically diluted materialism of our time. The impish critique of normative values that characterized that ingenious show and that continues to characterize its cinematic sequels would seem an unlikely platform for the analysis of the arts or the improvement of connoisseurship. When probing a potentially disorienting issue like the redevelopment of a culture in which beauty is a central concern, popular perversities like The Addams Family sometimes make important, oddly encouraging points. Looking past the inverted “situation” that made this program one of the most innovative “sitcoms” of the television age and looking at what actually happens within individual episodes, viewers may quickly find evidence for the resurgence of beauty in even hostile situations. The Addamses dress exquisitely if not eccentrically; they practice an odd sort of landscape gardening; they maintain a variety of collections; they display canvasses and esteem portraiture; they venerate the culinary arts. They spend almost all their time in the pursuit not only of happiness, but also of beauty. ­One encouraging point made by such programming is that beauty is not only part of or an abbreviation for large social and economic processes but is both inescapable in and central to cultural activity of all kinds, including those that call for hardheadedly political or economic rather than aesthetic approaches. The farther revolutionary thinkers or materialist philosophers or experimentally minded artists stray from beauty, the more likely beauty is to reappear in unexpected, often assertive ways, as occurs when the creators of The Addams Family begin with a satiric reduction of gothic horror and with a relentless burlesque of what American conservatives call “family values” but end up representing an affectionate, stable family that prides itself on its aesthetical pursuits.

Beginning with this idea of the inevitability of beauty—its tendency to come into the center of attention when least expected or even when shunned—this essay will attempt to diagnose and explain the aversion to beauty that plagues contemporary cultural establishments (museums, universities, professional organizations). It will consider the vitality of beauty in a variety of literary and artistic contexts from which the popular critics of our day would exclude it. Finally, it will discuss why beauty is an essential, definitive feature of civilized culture.

­The twenty-first century is already defining itself as a period of disempowering expertise. A visit to any new housing development, for example, will show that the simple action of planting a few shade trees or of scattering a few grass seeds has been “upgraded” into the “installation of plant materials” by (moderately skillful) “professionals” who “contract” to do what is optimistically called “landscaping.” Analogously, sweating on the treadmill has given way to consultation with “personal trainers” while playground fun has been “enhanced” into “play dates” for children who enroll in “activity centers.” These examples suggest how, in our beauty-starved times, those with cultural aspirations seek to beautify their experience (by presenting it as more glitzy and professionalized than anything that has gone before) while disabling themselves (by affirming their inability to plant a tree or to run a lap or to play in the park).

­­Similarly self-defeating expert “discourses” have come to dominate the academic analysis of culture and thereby to gain a foothold in the education of future generations. One should not be too quick to lay all the blame on recent times: the twentieth century as a whole has gradually relocated cultural activity from private persons and into universities, museums, libraries, and other habitats for institutionalized professionals. It is easy to forget that, little more than 100 years ago, most collectible art was held in private hands and the few university English Departments that existed counted as innovations. The trend toward the cloistering of cultural activity in public institutions dominated by syndicates of professionals has accelerated during the last few decades, spurred on by the professionalization of humanities funding, whether in the emergence of international mega-foundations such as the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or in the growing influence of state-sponsored funding agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung or the numerous arts councils administered by individual states. Quietly overlooked in this fluorescence of “support for the arts” is the degree to which individual citizens as well as individual writers and artists become beholden and thereby obeisant to funding cartels.

It is true that the arts have always been supported by the rich and famous or vetted by the influential. Without the papacy there would have been no Sistine Chapel; without Tudor support, Shakespeare would have looked elsewhere for funding and would have written otherwise than he did; despite his satiric inclinations, Horace relished Augustus’s nod. The difference between old-style patronage, with its potential for tyranny and censorship, and our contemporary charity- or cartel-driven arts funding might be abbreviated in a phrase like “invisible industrialism.” Whatever its faults, the patronage system stresses the ambitions, whimsies, idiosyncrasies, and occasionally tastes of magnates or strongmen, thereby unwittingly promoting variety in the arts. Modern grants panels, on the other hand, encourage artists and writers to follow a largely hypothetical idea of national, “cutting-edge” taste, to produce proposals and works intended to please anonymous panels of judges drawn from across the nation or to attract at least some support from some audience in any conceivable venue. Such a system is “industrial” in that it tends to produce the largest possible volume of the most standardized art that will be the least unnerving to the greatest number of those people who have the means to acquire or appreciate it. It is “invisible” in that the most frequently recruited judges, although unofficially known to everyone, are represented as somewhat ghostly, itinerant, national entities who hover in the mists of anonymity—as “panels of nationally recognized experts.” That such a model is “industrial” is not an indication that the art arising from it is popular or accessible. Rather, this model serves specific privileged consumers: those who have the economic or educational or cultural means to browse in the cultural market. Remarkably and sadly, American conservatives often imitate this “invisible industrialism” by creating their own expert panels and by attempting to define a somewhat abstract national conservative taste. Whether from the left- or right-wing cultural camps, the art and literature that emerges from such a support system is usually characterized by instrumentalism rather than aestheticism, whether (on the left) the promoting of the (extra-artistic) achievements of this or that underprivileged group or (on the right) inculcating moral values.