Even the ancient Greeks with their sublime standards of proportion, harmony, and otherworldly perfection, passed down images and stories of ugly and frightening creatures, both human and non-human. The grotesque and horrific entered Christianity in the Book of Revelation, scenes from which became favorite subjects for such later artists as Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Duhrer, and Fra Angelico. Hell, the Devil, and St. Anthony's temptations (hard to look at for very long) were favorite themes. Ugliness, like beauty, experienced numerous changes in fashion over the centuries, now displayed in the images of old women, now in dwarves and corpses, and often in frightful images of dragons, mythical beasts, and monsters of all kinds. In the modern era, the ugliness of industrial cities and the deformed people who inhabit them find expression on the canvases (and on movie screens!) of artists usually admired for less disturbing works, as well as some who seem to be ugliness specialists.
Judgments of ugliness, like those of beauty, are ultimately subjective, and Aristotle may find some support for his claim that the skill of a great artist can render beautiful an ugly object. However, I am inclined to the view of Umberto Eco (On Ugliness, 2007) who asserted there are some realities that no one can render pleasant by any philosphical maneuver or aesthetic rationalization. A few moments with Salvador Dali's Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) is probably all you will need to see his point. When artists painted or sculpted images of demons or severed limbs or the unadorned human genitalia or a pile of trash, they knew their subjects are ugly, they intended their works to reflect that ugliness, and they would likely be put off by anyone who did not react to them with revulsion or horror.
In the vast catalogue of ugly works of Western art, there are virtually no depictions of ugly landscapes other than those that have been destroyed or desecrated by human beings. Almost all the images of ugliness are of humans or creatures that bear enough resemblance to humans that we cannot behold them without self-reference. What are we to make of this? We find a clue in Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that what we humans hate above all is the deformation of our own kind. Ernest Becker (Denial of Death, 1973) nailed the point precisely, I think: for us the body is always an existential problem. The evolution of the psyche from an infantile identification with bodily sensations through various stages of dawning self-consciousness brings us finally to a fully realized ability to contemplate ourselves and our situation as embodied, finite beings whose universal destiny is decline, disease, old age, and death. Our reaction is painfully split: on the one hand we yearn for liberation from this decaying flesh and for the perfection of the gods, while on the other we know perfectly well that without our ambiguous embodiment there can be no experience of truth, of love, of beauty, or indeed of anything like life as we have come to know it.
If beauty is truth, as Keats wrote, then, as artists of all eras seem to insist, ugliness is also truth. In this ultimately mysterious universe, beauty and ugliness are, equally, fundamental elements of the order of things and of our own being.
- C. Marxer
Wednesday 28 December 2011
Friday 16 December 2011
MUST ART BE BEAUTIFUL?
The simple answer is "No," as will be readily understood by anyone who has heard the music of Metallica or seen any pictorial representation of the temptations of Saint Anthony. Of course, we could always deny that heavy metal music is art, a move that exposes just one of the complexities involved in our topic question. What counts as art? What is beauty? What is the opposite of beauty? If some art is not beautiful, how are we to characterize it? Only the last of these is directly relevant to our topic, so I propose to begin with a set of orienting principles that, if not self-evident, are so widely shared as to provide an acceptable platform from which to begin our inquiry.
1. The term art can be suitably applied to any deliberately created product of the human imagination. This definition makes room for children's art, folk art, and decorative crafts, but excludes dreams and the elegant trails left by sidewinders slithering across desert sands. It also excludes the nifty nests of bower birds, although if someone insists on making a case for them, I won't contest the point.
2. Aesthetic judgment - a claim that an object is beautiful or not - is a prerogative of rational beings.
3. We call a work of art beautiful when it occasions in us a high degree of pleasure.
4. One thing can be more beautiful than another.
5. The judgment of taste is about the beautiful object, not about the subject's state of mind. (#3, 4, and 5 are from R. Scruton, A Very Short Introduction to Beauty).
6. Shared agreement about what is beautiful and what is not is common both within and across different cultures, along with lots of disagreement.
Given these initial ideas, our task is to attempt to make a case, either for or against the proposition that art must be beautiful. Metallica and St. Anthony provide an easy first answer, but a more careful look reveals some interesting subtleties. James Joyce distinguished proper from improper art. The latter refers to works that tend to arouse some kind of desire in the experiencer. Examples include pornography, didactic and propagandistic art. Art is proper when it is experienced without any inclination to possess its subject or to perform some action. In that opinion, Joyce agrees with other thinkers, such as philosopher Roger Scruton and historian Umberto Eco. The idea is that the experience of beauty is disinterested appreciation - contemplation of a beautiful object solely for the delight, pleasure, joy, or spiritual feeling it evokes in us.
It is not clear from the above that Joyce would claim that only proper art is beautiful, but we can be pretty certain he would say that a lot of improper art is not beautiful. He would find lots of takers for that position. We can add a number of particulars to his broad category: boring art, poorly executed art, most children's art, raw sketches, doodles, and conceptual art (20th century) come to mind. There may be others, but I think the most fascinating opposite-to-beauty is ugliness. It may come as a surprise to many people to learn that alongside the history of beauty is a history of ugliness in art that is equally compelling, although in a different way.
Since earliest times, artists have not hesitated to portray ugliness in its many forms: the deformed, the chaotic, the disgusting, the monstrous, the diabolical, the terrifying, the gory, etc. Tender-minded philosophers like Plato and Marcus Aurelius have tried to avoid the reality of ugliness in various ways, but the persistent attention to ugliness by artists throughout the ages makes for a strong case that ugliness is not merely the absence of beauty but that, in art, it delivers powerful symbols of a dark component of reality itself.
In Part 2 of this essay, I will explore in greater detail the concept of ugliness in art.
- C. Marxer
1. The term art can be suitably applied to any deliberately created product of the human imagination. This definition makes room for children's art, folk art, and decorative crafts, but excludes dreams and the elegant trails left by sidewinders slithering across desert sands. It also excludes the nifty nests of bower birds, although if someone insists on making a case for them, I won't contest the point.
2. Aesthetic judgment - a claim that an object is beautiful or not - is a prerogative of rational beings.
3. We call a work of art beautiful when it occasions in us a high degree of pleasure.
4. One thing can be more beautiful than another.
5. The judgment of taste is about the beautiful object, not about the subject's state of mind. (#3, 4, and 5 are from R. Scruton, A Very Short Introduction to Beauty).
6. Shared agreement about what is beautiful and what is not is common both within and across different cultures, along with lots of disagreement.
Given these initial ideas, our task is to attempt to make a case, either for or against the proposition that art must be beautiful. Metallica and St. Anthony provide an easy first answer, but a more careful look reveals some interesting subtleties. James Joyce distinguished proper from improper art. The latter refers to works that tend to arouse some kind of desire in the experiencer. Examples include pornography, didactic and propagandistic art. Art is proper when it is experienced without any inclination to possess its subject or to perform some action. In that opinion, Joyce agrees with other thinkers, such as philosopher Roger Scruton and historian Umberto Eco. The idea is that the experience of beauty is disinterested appreciation - contemplation of a beautiful object solely for the delight, pleasure, joy, or spiritual feeling it evokes in us.
It is not clear from the above that Joyce would claim that only proper art is beautiful, but we can be pretty certain he would say that a lot of improper art is not beautiful. He would find lots of takers for that position. We can add a number of particulars to his broad category: boring art, poorly executed art, most children's art, raw sketches, doodles, and conceptual art (20th century) come to mind. There may be others, but I think the most fascinating opposite-to-beauty is ugliness. It may come as a surprise to many people to learn that alongside the history of beauty is a history of ugliness in art that is equally compelling, although in a different way.
Since earliest times, artists have not hesitated to portray ugliness in its many forms: the deformed, the chaotic, the disgusting, the monstrous, the diabolical, the terrifying, the gory, etc. Tender-minded philosophers like Plato and Marcus Aurelius have tried to avoid the reality of ugliness in various ways, but the persistent attention to ugliness by artists throughout the ages makes for a strong case that ugliness is not merely the absence of beauty but that, in art, it delivers powerful symbols of a dark component of reality itself.
In Part 2 of this essay, I will explore in greater detail the concept of ugliness in art.
- C. Marxer
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