I try not to lean too heavily upon quotation in these pieces but there is one particular soundbite that has haunted my thoughts since I first heard it. It’s from the rapper Kanye West:

“Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them as luxury”

I suspect he may be right. I fear that beauty itself is a diminishing force, and that this thing that was once public and plentiful has become a private and precious commodity, only grasped by those who have the resources to hoard it and the privileged understanding of its life-affirming, life-giving importance.

I fear that with each new year, with each new architectural eyesore and with each new fleeting fast fashion craze that beauty itself is slipping further away from the everyday person’s reality. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Because a world without beauty cannot endure for long. These are my fears. And like all fears you deal with them by facing them head on…

Beauty sold back as luxury.

This sleight of hand makes beauty a rarity, a thing for only the chosen few, or exclusive to only set places and occasions. Whereas in a society built on solid foundations beauty should be built into the very infrastructure of it (as this infrastructure is based on human need), it should be as free, abundant and as plentiful as flowers and trees are in nature. Nature is ultimately the model for all beauty and for all art

, it is the template that shows us how things are done in terms of colour, proportion and form. This truth has been forgotten, or more cynically it has been ignored or suppressed or rendered either passé or trite.

Why has this been done? Well, we could speculate as to the psychology of the would-be