On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the same limits. Poetry can move through violence, describe horror, and pass onward before the mind is forced to remain before one unbearable image. Sculpture and painting, unlike poetry, occupy space. They show one instant or moment. A distorted face, fixed forever at the extremity of agony may become not tragic, but repellent. The artist can choose and represent suffering without allowing suffering to abolish beauty. This distinction is more than a technical point about the arts, and it marks a moral tension in representation of society.
The eighteenth century changed the terms of this question through the idea of the Sublime. Beauty was often discussed as order, proportion, harmony, and measure. The Sublime turned attention toward experiences that overwhelmed measure: storms, cliffs, abysses, darkness, silence, ruins, rough seas, and boundless spaces. Sublime in the arts is terror held at a distance, and terror converted into reflection.
Burke understood the power of this difference. A storm at sea can terrify the sailor and delight the spectator on shore. The difference in perceptions is within our relation to it. When danger cannot possess us, fear becomes an aesthetic experience – we are shaken, grown, challenged, yet not threatened. Kant help identify and gave this experience a philosophical structure. For example, the starry sky suggests a magnitude that the senses cannot comprehend. A storm suggests a power before which the body is small. In both cases, the Sublime humbles our sensible nature and also reveals an inward freedom.
Romanticism inherited this discovery and altered the history of beauty. Beauty was no longer the ruling category of art. The ugly, the grotesque, the irregular, the demonic, the ruined, and the deformed became more than failures of form, and grew in material through modern art could communicate. Friedrich Schlegel saw the shift with likely unease. He preferred the classical ideal, and he associated modern ugliness with a decline from the ancient order. Yet, even in his resistance, he recognized something essential. Modern art was drawn to the interesting, the characteristic, and the individual. Modern art sought the particular being, marked by defect, history, desire, and contradiction. This is why Shakespeare mattered so much to the Romantics (romantic thought). His view did not separate beauty from ugliness in a clean philosophical diagram. Kings are foolish, fools are wise, lovers are ridiculous, villains are intelligent, and bodies carry appetite, ambition, frailty, and decay. The beautiful is no longer pure, and it resides among impurities.
By the nineteenth century, ugliness had become an emergent stand-alone subject. For example, Hegel treated it as a necessary moment in the life of beauty, which collides with beauty and forces it to become conscious of its own limits. Later writers made this even more explicit. One example is of Karl Rosenkranz, in his Aesthetics of Ugliness, developed a wide taxonomy of unseemly, repugnant, horrendous, empty, nauseating, criminal, demonic, witchlike, and caricatural. This represents an artistic structure that emerged in art in the period.
Victor Hugo made the strongest Romantic claim for this enlargement of art. In the preface to Cromwell, he placed the grotesque at the center of modern aesthetics. The grotesque, for Hugo, was the counterweight to the beautiful, the force that brought art down from ideal abstraction into the mixed condition of human life. Christianity, the Middle Ages, cathedral monsters, carnival laughter, Shakespearean drama, and the modern novel all belonged to this field.
The grotesque destroys the neat order of the world and not in a nihilistic way. It reveals that the world is not as neat as the classical ideal portrayed – it reminds us that the human being was not a statue, a proportion, or an untouched marble form. The human being can be comic and tragic, noble and ridiculous, luminous and damaged – all at the same time. Ugliness in art can become a cheap instrument and used to startle, degrade, flatter, cynicism, or to mistake obscenity for truth. Violation of beauty is not normally profound and can be careless.
The danger to society – There is a societal danger, that a culture that permits only beauty is dishonest. It polishes the wound until the wound disappears under the surface of a scar. Proportion is preserved at the cost of wisdom and experience. Excellent art, today, does not worship or remove ugliness. It holds ugliness within form long enough for judgment to occur.
References
- “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” Wikipedia. Link
- “Laocoön and His Sons,” Wikipedia. Link
- “Sublime,” Wikipedia. [Link]
- J. Shelley, “18th Century British Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- H. Ginsborg, “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- “Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- A. Speight, “Friedrich Schlegel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University. [Link]
- Hugo, V. , “Preface,” Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, University Press of Florida. [Link]
- “Romanticism,” Wikipedia. Available: [Link]
- “The Birth of Tragedy,” Wikipedia. [Link]