Beauty and Ugliness

Dubuffet’s work and language carry an undercurrent of moral judgment that often accompanies aesthetics of ugly, while an aesthetics that seeks beauty is often accused of escapism and hedonism.

Dubuffet also commented that the distinctions between the categories of ugliness and beauty are western concepts. He sees questions of beauty or ugliness as irrelevant to primitive art or art brut. Arthur Danto in his book the Abuse of Beauty would agree beauty was not “the point of most of the world’s great art (36).”

How can I then justify using the terms ugliness or beauty if they were part of a false hieractical system? Or if questions of beautiness or ugliness are limiting concept provided by a Eurocentric view of art?

The problem with the two terms is that I risk reducing art into binary categories, essentializing artists and making their works easy, ignoring their paradouxes. I want to use ugly and beauty as helpful terms in an understanding of art. The categories are contingent, but are useful in describing an artist’s tone and intention, not in perpetuating a simple duality. Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Deminsion writes, quoting Adorno, “‘even the cry of despair…still pays its tribute to the infamous affirmation’ and a representation of the most extreme suffering ‘still contains the potential to wring out enjoyment (66).’” In other words, both extremes carry their own contradiction within them. Beauty contains seeds of decay and the ugly the chance of redemption.