cism”. But the movement is not simply a return to ancient European
ideas. It has learnt from the extraordinary advances in the sciences that
have happened in the last few hundred years; it recognizes that classi-
cism is not an exclusively European property, but a miracle that has hap-
pened many times throughout the world in a variety of societies. Ancient
classicisms have proposed fixed and perfect ideals that never change;
the new classicism sees the world as evolving into a richer and richer
mix of physical and spiritual complexity. I have proposed the term “nat-
ural classicism” for the movement as a whole; our capacity for making
and experiencing beauty is part of our nature, beauty is a real property
of the universe, and our ability to feel and create it is founded on iden-
tifiable brain functions that are as universal as human speech. Thus
beauty is not a mere convention but a fundamental human capacity and
human need.
The movement is still a minority element within the arts establish-
ments, and is subject to various degrees of formal, informal or covert
censorship by the academy, the public and private foundations, and some
museums, publishers, critical periodicals, galleries, and the like. But in
poetry the new movement is now recognized throughout the academy,
and university and college creative writing classes have started teaching
the techniques of meter and rhyme again. Several new periodicals, such
as The Edge City Review, Light,and Pivot, together with a rush of online
magazines like Expansive Poetry and Music, cater to the new literary
taste.
The Derriere Guard, an artistic group named tongue-in-cheek by its
founder, the musical composer Stefania de Kenessey, is one of the most
prominent representatives of the movement as a whole, bringing
together parallel developments in architecture, music, sculpture, paint-
ing, poetry, and city planning in a cheeky and insouciant riposte to the
avant-garde. The Derriere Guard has already staged major arts events in
New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and on December 7th–8th 2001
initiated the first of a series of salons at its headquarters in the upper
west side of Manhattan.
Dozens of vital, fresh-faced young painters, refugees from the grim
cloisters of the Politically Correct arts schools, throng Jacob Collins’s
atelier in New York. The Art Renewal website (http://www.artrenewal
.org/) gets thousands of hits every month. Fort Worth’s beautiful Bass
symphony hall, the cities of Celebration and Seaside in Florida, and
Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, together with many new building
projects in cities and universities, exemplify the New Urbanism move-
ment in architecture and planning. Robert Stern, the neotraditionalist136 Frederick Turner