“A lot of art, especially of the past, has set out to be beautiful; a lot of art, especially of the present, has set out to be ugly. Or, if not ugly, then at least workaday in its surface sheen, for fear that too much beauty might distract from whatever hard truths the film or painting or composition wishes to tell us. And yet there has been a kind of semi-guilty underground cult of beauty that has persisted through our ugly times.”