by Sherman J. Clark
In earlier essays, I argued that beauty can orient our desires and help us thrive in an age of algorithmic manipulation (Beatrice 2.0) and explored how our habits of mind help or hinder us in the effort to seek and see beauty (Aesthetic Phronesis). But even those most capable of wonder can be thwarted by the structures around them. A child who grows up without access to parks or music, a worker whose every moment is colonized by productivity: these are not failures of individual vision but failures of justice.
We face a peculiar injustice when it comes to beauty: it is both hoarded and dismissed as superfluous. These problems intertwine and reinforce each other. Because beauty resists the metrics of productivity that dominate our culture, we fail to recognize it as essential. And because we don’t recognize it as essential, we tolerate its radical maldistribution.
Some will say: in a world where people lack food, housing, or medical care, isn’t it elitist, even indecent, to talk about beauty? I think the opposite is true. What is elitist is the assumption that only elites deserve the things that make life meaningful. What is elitist is the implicit assumption that only wealthy children should have a guide like Beatrice, while everyone else should focus on becoming efficient units of production. To insist that beauty belongs to all is not to indulge in luxury but to refuse a cruel double standard—the belief that nourishment for the soul is optional for some and essential only for others.
Picture two public schools, five miles apart. In one, students walk past gardens and murals, learn music and theater, take field trips to museums. In the other, students pass through metal detectors; the art teacher’s position has gone unfilled for three years; “enrichment” means test prep. Both sets of children are equally capable of awe. Yet only some are invited into beauty, while others are taught—by architecture, by curriculum, by omission—that beauty is not for them.
What these two schools reveal is not just inequality of resources but inequality of invitation. This is the double violence: to withhold beauty and to convince people they don’t need it. And the harm doesn’t stop there. As I argued in Beatrice 2.0, beauty orients desire in ways that help us resist manipulation. When beauty is hoarded or dismissed, people become easier to sell to and easier to steer, hungrier for stimulation, less practiced in wonder. The attention economy profits from this deprivation: if our eyes and ears aren’t drawn toward what nourishes, they are more easily captured by whatever is profitable.
The problem runs deeper than simple selfishness. When art programs are cut, when parks are paved over, when libraries close, we’re told these are “unfortunate but necessary” sacrifices. Necessary for what? For efficiency, for test scores—for all the things that can be measured and monetized. But beauty’s resistance to commodification is precisely what makes it vital. It insists on values that can’t be captured in spreadsheets. In a world where our desires are increasingly manufactured to serve others’ ends, beauty offers a different orientation—toward wonder rather than want, toward sharing rather than hoarding.
Yes, beauty is in some sense accessible to all, and thus essentially or at least potentially eggetarian. A parent working three jobs may hum a lullaby in a cramped apartment; that quiet song is beauty, sustaining both parent and child. A community garden in a food desert provides nourishment, but also the beauty of flowers and shared work. These are reminders that survival and wonder can intertwine. A pickup basketball game on cracked pavement may offer as much grace and awe as a symphony hall.
These small scenes remind us what is possible when beauty enters ordinary life. But we also need to see how, at scale, such access is systematically denied. Beauty gets hoarded through familiar mechanisms. Museums and concert halls price themselves for the privileged. Theaters cluster in wealthy neighborhoods while poorer areas become aesthetic deserts. Architecture itself enforces the divide: some children grow up in buildings designed with care, others in spaces whose very walls convey neglect.
But the dismissal is more insidious. Even where beauty exists, we justify it in productivity’s terms. Music education defends itself through improved test scores. The person lingering at sunset is seen as idle. Beauty becomes acceptable only when enlisted in efficiency’s service. The cycle continues: dismissal enables hoarding, hoarding reinforces dismissal.
Throughout history, movements have understood that demanding beauty means challenging the entire value system that treats it as superfluous. The WPA arts projects made this case with particular force. In the depths of the Great Depression, when a quarter of Americans were unemployed, the government didn’t just build bridges—it paid artists, musicians, and writers. Post offices filled with murals, theater troupes traveled rural roads, symphonies played in small towns. This wasn’t charity. It was recognition that beauty is sustenance, as necessary as bread.
From the public library movement’s insistence that Shakespeare belongs to the steelworker as much as the scholar, to the Black Arts movements’ proclamation that beauty is both resistance and affirmation of full humanity, these efforts shared a conviction: the struggle for beauty is inseparable from the struggle for dignity. When Zora Neale Hurston collected folklore, when John Coltrane reimagined jazz, they were refusing the double violence—rejecting both exclusion from mainstream beauty and the lie that beauty doesn’t matter. Their work proclaimed: this is ours, and it is essential.
Today’s battle for beauty isn’t just about access—it’s about attention itself. In an economy that treats our focus as a resource to be mined, beauty becomes resistance. It demands presence rather than productivity, contemplation rather than consumption. This is what Jenny O’Dell captures in How to Do Nothing—recovering our capacity to notice is not escapism but resistance. When we sit quietly in a park, when we listen to birds, when we let our attention rest rather than race, we’re refusing the premise that every moment must generate value for someone else.
I think of this when I remember a friend teasing me as I went broke sending my daughters to liberal arts colleges. “What jobs will they get reading Shakespeare?” My response: We don’t read Shakespeare to get jobs. We have jobs so we can read Shakespeare. Of course, I know the privilege in even having that choice. But the principle remains: beauty is not the reward for productivity. It’s what productivity should serve.
Sometime public life seems to understand this. Vermont’s prohibition on billboards declares that mountain views matter more than commercial messages. This isn’t mere aesthetic preferences—it’s a recognition that beauty sustains communities in ways advertising never could. And the fight is also against homogenization: the global sameness of chain stores, filtered photos, and algorithmic playlists. Beauty thrives in plurality, in the particular ways communities make meaning. Indigenous traditions, local vernaculars, regional music—these aren’t quaint holdovers but vital alternatives to homogenization.
We live in a political moment when arts programs are first to be cut, when public institutions that democratize beauty face constant threats, when the very idea of public goods seems under siege. This is precisely why articulating beauty’s necessity matters now. Earlier generations facing their own dark times—the Depression, Jim Crow—still invested in beauty as a lifeline. What follows may seem ambitious given our current climate, but these are stars to steer by, reminders of what we should demand especially when those in power suggest we settle for less.
Imagine if we treated beauty as the public good it is. Culture vouchers for all citizens—redeemable at museums, concerts, theaters, parks—would declare beauty a right, not charity. We could evaluate public decisions for aesthetic impact alongside economic effects: Does this zoning create dead space or living space? Communities could be empowered to decide what would make their neighborhoods more beautiful and could be provided resources to pursue those visions. And most radically, we could recognize time as a democratic resource. Shorter workweeks, secure leave, predictable schedules—these create conditions for beauty to be noticed. Without time, all other access remains hollow. A parent working three jobs may live near a museum but never enter it.
These proposals aren’t more ambitious than earlier generations’ insistence that libraries should be free, that post offices should have murals, that arts should flourish during crisis. What’s truly utopian is imagining democracy can thrive when beauty is hoarded and dismissed. And we already have models: public broadcasting that brings symphonies into living rooms, school systems that once made room for art and music for every child, zoning rules that safeguard light and air. The question is not possibility but priority.
Beauty’s resistance to commodification—the quality that makes capitalism undervalue it—is what makes it necessary now. In a world where our attention is harvested, our desires manufactured, beauty offers a different way of being. It requires presence, patience, attention that can’t be monetized. And this too links back to Beatrice 2.0: beauty is not only sustenance but also a defense. Without it, we are more easily manipulated, our longings diverted to whatever can be sold. To cultivate democratic beauty is to cultivate citizens harder to buy, harder to fool.
This is why democratic beauty matters. Not as distraction from “real” justice but as part of defining what justice means. We know how to build beautiful schools, parks, libraries. We know how to make time for wonder. What we lack isn’t knowledge but conviction—the belief that beauty matters enough to fight for, that everyone deserves it.
This, finally, is why democratic access to beauty matters so deeply. A democracy that shares beauty widely is not just one more capable of joy; it is one more capable of truth. Without beauty, citizens are tempted either to look away from cruelty or to collapse into cynicism. With beauty, they are better able to face hard truths and still believe in possibility. Beauty fortifies us against despair, not by covering over the world’s wounds but by insisting that wounds are not the whole of it. To withhold beauty is therefore to weaken civic courage. To share it is to make a people more capable of facing what must be faced.
I think here of Frost’s Star-Splitter, where Bradford burned down his farm for the chance to buy a telescope. His neighbors mocked him, yet when he and the narrator stood together under the night sky, they saw more clearly than ever before—and connected to each other better than ever. Beauty justified the risk. Bradford was vindicated, and in wonder he found companionship. But in a just world, one should not have to destroy one’s livelihood or endure ridicule to glimpse the stars. Beauty should not depend on desperation or eccentricity. Let along on wealth. It should be part of the ordinary fabric of our lives, shared without shame, available to all.