Ugliness can belong to judgments we make about people, periods, and other social classes. For example, a Gothic cathedral can be barbarous in one century and protected as a masterpiece in another. A body admired in one period can look strange in another, and the object remains while judgment changes.
This extends the problem I wrote about in Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism, where ugliness is material for art rather than a failure of beauty – see https://saemiller.com/2026/06/07/ugliness-in-art-redemption-romanticism/ Saverio Bettinelli could regard Dante as coarse. Gothic architecture itself was treated by many later Europeans as primitive and barbarous. The same buildings are now preserved as high achievements of European art. This is like the Eiffel Tower, which I discussed previously. The artists who protested against Eiffel were seeing a new form through a previous visual philosophy. Iron, exposed structure, and industrial scale violated what Paris was expected to look like. Eventually the tower became part of the city itself – see https://saemiller.com/2026/08/21/the-eiffel-tower-and-industrial-beauty/.
We compare what we see with what we have already learned to recognize. In Eros Barefoot, Beauty Unfinished, I considered a related problem. Once proportion becomes a rule then a departure from rule is a defect – see https://saemiller.com/2026/01/17/eros-barefoot-beauty-unfinished/ That is, beauty can be natural after its conventions have become familiar.
Ugliness can combined to be social through personal taste. The leisure class has often regarded the tastes of the working class as vulgar. Established wealth may regard new wealth as vulgar because it is displayed too openly. For example, a room can contain expensive stone, gold, furniture, paintings, and fabrics, and still be judged cheap. Their offense is a failure to follow an accepted measure.
Kitsch develops from this problem of taste. Garden gnomes, devotional pictures, fake Venetian canals, decorative lamps, political monuments, sentimental paintings, and reproductions of older styles can all be called kitsch. Schopenhauer approached the problem through seventeenth century Dutch paintings of food. If painted fruit mainly makes the observer hungry, then the work stimulates appetite rather than contemplation. Hermann Broch treated this production of effects more severely. Kitsch tries to produce the response reliably, and beauty, sadness, eroticism, dignity, nostalgia, and grandeur become the product.
Excellent art also produces effects – Michelangelo can produce grandeur, religious art can produce devotion, music can produce sadness, but art is not kitsch merely because it moves us. Kitsch often borrows the appearance of established art to justify a simple effect.
Giovanni Boldini provides a good example, where his portraits of wealthy women are technically accomplished and often beautiful. Dresses dissolve into long brushstrokes, backgrounds become indistinct, fabrics break into motion, and parts of the picture approach abstraction. The sitter is sensual, and the rest of the painting demonstrates that the painter is modern and sophisticated. This represents two artistic systems in the same picture. The first presents the woman as an object of desire, and the second presents the portrait as serious art.
Dwight Macdonald wrote about a similar problem through his distinction between masscult and midcult. Midcult borrows discoveries from high-culture, simplifies them, and makes them available as familiar products without completely giving up the appearance of difficulty. The association with age, craft, nobility, or culture is retained after the original structure that produced it is gone. This is opposite of what Eiffel accomplished by not concealing iron beneath stone. Kitsch works by hiding a new object inside an appearance of old authority.
Returning to Camp, Susan Sontag in Notes on “Camp” (1964), described Camp as a sensibility attracted to artificiality, exaggeration, theatricality, and excess. Art Nouveau, Opera, elaborate clothing, old movies, decorative interiors, comic books, can all become camp. The best camp often requires sincerity in the original object. Sontag gives the example of the Art Nouveau craftsman making a lamp with a snake coiled around it. Excess becomes camp when another observer recognizes the difference between intention and result.
An observer who enjoys something as camp is different from the person who simply enjoys the same thing. For example, one person loves the garden gnome because it is a garden gnome, and the other loves it because he knows he should hate it. This connects naturally with the twentieth century Avant-Garde where artists deliberately produce works that earlier standards judge ugly. https://saemiller.com/2026/09/13/avant-garde-and-ugliness/ For example, Picasso was accepted into museums and Duchamp was discussed in art textbooks.
The history of kitsch and camp should make the judgment of ugliness less certain. It is well to think about at judgement in that we should divide between identifying violation of our own conventions versus a defect in an object. When something is ugly, are we describing the object, its effect, or the observer who likes it? Historically, these have been shown to be separate judgements.
References
- Susan, S. and Fabio, C., 1964. Notes on Camp. Partisan Review, 31(4), pp. 515-530.
- McConnell, S. “E. Haldeman-Julius and the Little Blue Bookworms: The Bridging of Cultural Styles, 1919–1951.” Prospects 11 (1986): 59-79.
- MacDonald, D, Masscult And Midcult: The Partisan Review, V27, No. 4, Spring, 1960.
- Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Idea-Vol. I. Vol. 1. Read Books Ltd, 2015.
- Broch, H. “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch.” Kitsch: the world of bad taste (1969): 49-76.
- Greenberg, C. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” (1939): 1900-1990.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. “A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.” Cambridge, MA (1984).