How Did Everything Become So Ugly?

If culture articulates a system of values, as art critic and political commentator Roger Kimball tells Lee Smith, what does it say about contemporary American society when it rejects what is beautiful and noble and embraces all that is grotesquely ugly and stupid?

3:50 Culture articulates a system of values
5:50 Instead of championing beauty, institutions embrace the ugly
9:50 The left has inverted values and turned beauty into ugliness
10:30 The right has withdrawn from culture
20:00 Our humanity is drawn to the beautiful
21:00 Art that loses touch with beauty is sterile
25:40 The pursuit of beauty uncovers what is noble about us
34:00 The great war is the war between free and totalitarian societies