Natural Classicism
Frederick Turner When I heard that Frederick Turner had died, in November of last year, my first thought was, “oh no, now it’s up to us!” Because this mild-mannered professor was fomenting revolution, the very revolution in the arts I have wanted to see my whole life. Essentially, when you show that “beauty is a real property of things and rooted in the physical universe, then the whole body of contemporary critical theory and practice is deeply in error and should be revised.” Turner’s theory, which he calls “natural classicism,” wishes to “rejoin artist with public, beauty with morality, high art with low, art with craft, passion with intelligence, art with science and past with future.” No small task! I am quoting from a paper Turner prepared in 1995 for the Conference on the Unity of the Sciences which you can read in its entirety here. It is a concise formulation of a theory that posits beauty as an engine of evolution, which Turner has been suggesting throughout his many writing...
