Scruton's conversation with artist Michael Craig-Martin, from the documentary Why Beauty Matters: Scruton: "When I first entered St. Peter's and confronted Michelangelo's Pieta, for me that was a transforming experience. My life was changed by this. Do you think someone can have the same experience with Duchamp's Urinal or perhaps with your Oak Tree, which after all is a similar thing?" Craig-Martin: “When I was a teenager and first came upon Duchamp and first came upon the ready-mades I was absolutely stunned in amazement. I don't think people are overwhelmed by a sense of beauty when they see the Urinal. It's not meant to be beautiful. But that doesn't mean there isn't something about it that doesn't captivate the imagination. And I think 'captivate the imagination' is the key to what art seeks to do. Duchamp felt that art had become too interested in technique, too interested in optics. He felt that it had become intellectually and morally corrupt. His reason for making an art work that didn't fit the system was not cynicism. It was in order to say 'I am trying to make an art that denies all of the things that people say art should have because I am trying to say that the central question of art rest somewhere else.'" Scruton: "I take it that things had to change and Duchamp was trying to change them. But what was he trying to change them to?" Craig-Martin: "Well, he could never in his wildest dreams have imagined that what would happen. He himself had no idea how central the thing was he had stumbled upon—essentially that a work of art is a work of art because we think of it as such. I also think it is important to say that the notion of beauty has been extended to include things that would not have been thought of—that’s part of the artist's function, to make one see something as beautiful that no one thought was beautiful until now." Scruton: "Right, like a can of shit?" Craig-Martin: "Well, I’m not sure it's beautiful—it's not trying to be beautiful. But take as an example Jeff Koons. Some of his works are astoundingly beautiful." [Shown: Balloon Dog (2003)] Scruton: "Well, it looks like kitsch to me—with sugar on." Craig-Martin: "That's the subject of his work, not the substance of his work." Scruton: "What is the use of this art? What does it help people to do?" Craig-Martin: "I think, hopefully, it allows people to see the world in which they are living in a way that gives it more meaning to them. And it's not the world of an ideal world of some other world, some better place, but of the here and now, the world that they're in and they're trying to live more at ease in the world in which they are living."