Does art have to be beautiful?Of course not, the major works of
art especially in the twentieth and twenty first centuries are ugly.
What is Ugly art?Art that flout traditionally established conventions of aesthetics, perspective, compositions,colour .These are not aesthetically appealing are often provocative,offensive,grotesque, grim ,trivial or art that looks so simple that it can be replicated by a 5 year old.
Let us start with examples of not so beautiful art.Renaissance painter Caravaggio in the 17th century.He was said to “paint from life” because he used models and because he did not, in most cases, idealize human figures in the way Renaissance painters did. His paintings could also be called naturalistic for another reason: He had a penchant for street settings and for focusing on the ordinary, poor denizens of cities. His Madonnas lacked halos and saints had dirty feet. His tempestuous paintings depicted the drama of his turbulent life.
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| Michelangelo Da Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, Oil on Canvas, 1598-1599 |
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| Francis Bacon ,"Painting", Oil on Linen 1946 |
English artist Francis Bacon is best known for his post-World War II paintings, in which he represented the human face and figure in an expressive, often grotesque style.Most of his paintings from the 1940s to '60s depict the human figure, in scenes that suggest alienation, violence and suffering. Bacon's provocative, expressive work is considered some of the most important art of the postwar era.
Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions.Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables Emin to establish an intimacy with the viewer.Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarassing glory.Empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, stained sheets, undergarments, the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown.By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space,revealing herself as insecure as the rest of the world.
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| Tracy Emin, "My Bed", Bed, Mattress, Objects 1998 |
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| Damien Hirst -The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living , tiger shark corpse in formaldehyde,vitrine, 2004 |
Contemporary artist Damien Hirst's work depicts his fascination for dead animals, medical paraphernalia and such grim images of human mortality and those pleasures (gothic, prurient, sublime and verging on disgust) are sustainable across a body of work most renowned for its ‘shock value’.A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains an actual life cycle. Maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a claustrophobic glass vitrine. Above, hatched flies buzz around in the closed space. Many meet a violent end in an insect-o-cutor; others survive to continue the cycle.
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that "a five-year-old could have made them," and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the art world has been entirely unmoved. Of course, the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. Of course, a five-year old could in many cases have made an indistinguishable product. Those points are not arguable—and they are entirely beside the main question. The important question is: Why has the art world of the twentieth-century adopted the ugly and the offensive? Why has it poured its creative energies and cleverness into the trivial and the self-proclaimedly meaningless?
Art has a purpose
Today, beauty is no longer about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs the viewer to grapple with the world as it really is. Art is not a cosmetic to prettify reality or provide escapist pleasure but a hammer to smash our complacency.The philosopher George Santayana described beauty as "a living presence or an aching absence." In contemporary art, it's quite often an aching presence. As Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out, "Contemporary aesthetics has established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artistic representation had previously rejected"
No wonder starting from Goya's etchings on war to today's art reflects an unsettling sense of disturbance. Anselm Kiefer's charred landscapes or monumental emotionally charged sculptures. Or Lucian Freud's clotted canvases grotesquely exaggerating each crease and fleshly flaw in his models. It shouts: What a broken, saggy, ruined piece of work is man! If we don't want to be blind to reality, it behooves us to look at contemporary art, think about it, register its message, and understand its origins.
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Francisco Goya, From the series Disasters of War, etching on paper 1810-1820
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| Anselm Keifer ,Sternenfall(Chute d' etoiles),Cast Concrete, Lead Mesh, Human Hair.2004 |
Lucian Freud -Benefits Supervisor Sleep, Oil on Canvas, 2008
This challenge to convention reflects artists' "I cannot tell a lie" honesty. After the savagery of World War I, art turned to the dark side with wrenching paintings of brutality by German Expressionists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. "We had found in the war," the Dada artist Richard Huelsenbeck said in 1917, "that Goethe and Schiller and beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder." After World War II, Theodor Adorno said that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
George Grostz, Pillars of Society , Oil on Canvas, 1926
Anything new is considered ugly
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| Lucian Freud -Benefits Supervisor Sleep, Oil on Canvas, 2008 |
This challenge to convention reflects artists' "I cannot tell a lie" honesty. After the savagery of World War I, art turned to the dark side with wrenching paintings of brutality by German Expressionists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. "We had found in the war," the Dada artist Richard Huelsenbeck said in 1917, "that Goethe and Schiller and beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder." After World War II, Theodor Adorno said that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
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| George Grostz, Pillars of Society , Oil on Canvas, 1926 |
If some ancient Greek sculptors were awoken from a frozen state and presented with a Henry Moore, what would they make of it? Their likely bafflement should not give rise to a criticism either of their judgments or of ours, because Henry Moore’s works (only) make sense within the context of the history of sculpture. This context illustrates his reasons for the way he moulds his figures.
Impressionism, now beloved, was considered an assault on beauty when first exhibited in the 1860s. Critics scoffed that the paintings were sloppy, stupid, and meaningless Matisses Blue Nude and Picasso's Les Demoiselles de Avinon shocked audiences when they first saw them in early 1900s because they were a departure from their notions of beauty.– the same complaints one often hears about art today. As art critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first."
Curator Kimberly Orcutt says about Henri Mattise's Blue Nude which was presented for the first time in the Armoury show in New York, 1907 -The reclining female nude was a traditional subject, but it was presented in a "distorted" way: "With blue shadows, with colors that didn't have to do with the representation of nature. And some people considered this sort of a backwards step in cultural progress ... to challenge the very foundations of western civilization. ... She was seen as being very primitive, a threat to the progress they felt that they were making in the United States.
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| Heri Mattise, Blue Nude, Oil on Canvas 1907 |
Art exists within a broader cultural framework
Despite ol logic, but those themes are almost never generated from within the world of art
Until the enccasional invocations of "Art for art's sake" and attempts to withdraw from life, art has always been significant, probing the same issues about the human condition that all forms of cultural life probe. Artists are thinking and feeling human beings, and they think and feel intensely about the same important things that all intelligent and passionate humans do. Even when some artists claim that their work has no significance or reference or meaning, those claims are always significant, referential, and meaningful claims. What counts as a significant cultural claim, however, depends on what is going on in the broader intellectual and cultural framework. The world of art is not hermetically sealed—its themes can have an internal developmentad of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness, meaning, and passion. Its goals were beauty and originality. The artist was a skilled master of his craft. Such masters were able to create original representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining skill and vision, artists were exalted beings capable of creating objects that in turn had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience them.
The reason for the break way are many.
The rise of philosophical theories of skepticism and irrationalism led many to distrust their cognitive faculties of perception and reason.
A.The development of scientific theories of evolution and entropy brought with them pessimistic accounts of human nature and the destiny of the world.
B.The spread of liberalism and free markets caused their opponents on the political Left, many of whom were members of the artistic avant garde, to see political developments as a series of deep disappointments.
C. The technological revolutions spurred by the combination of science and capitalism led many to project a future in which mankind would be dehumanized or destroyed by the very machines that were supposed to improve its lot.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared.
The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for beauty. So the question became: What is the truth of art?
The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand for a recognition of the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying, horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible.
Edvard Munch got there first . If the truth is that reality is a horrifying, disintegrating swirl, then both form and content should express the feeling.
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| Edvard Munch ,The Scream, 1892 |
Pablo Picasso got there second. If the truth is that reality is fractured and empty, then both form and content must express that.
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| Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ,Oil on Canvas 1907 |
Salvador Dali's surrealist paintings go a step further: If the truth is that reality is unintelligible, then art can teach this lesson by using realistic forms against the idea that we can distinguish objective reality from irrational, subjective dreams.
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| Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, Oil on Canvas,1931 |
In modernism, art becomes a philosophical enterprise rather than an artistic one.This led to the rise of a parallel movement Reductionism.Reductionism asserts that to see the truth, eliminate what can be eliminated then see if it still can survive.
The driving purpose of modernism is not to do art but to find out what art is. We have eliminated X —is it still art? Now we have eliminated Y —is it still art? The point of the objects was not aesthetic experience; rather the works are symbols representing a stage in the evolution of a philosophical experiment. In most cases, the discussions about the works are much more interesting than the works themselves. That means that we keep the works in museums and archives and we look at them not for their own sake, but for the same reason scientists keep lab notes—as a record of their thinking at various stages. Or, to use a different analogy, the purpose of art objects is like that road signs along the highway—not as objects of contemplation in their own right but as markers to tell us how far we have traveled down a given road.
Colour and composition
The driving purpose of modernism is not to do art but to find out what art is. We have eliminated X —is it still art? Now we have eliminated Y —is it still art? The point of the objects was not aesthetic experience; rather the works are symbols representing a stage in the evolution of a philosophical experiment. In most cases, the discussions about the works are much more interesting than the works themselves. That means that we keep the works in museums and archives and we look at them not for their own sake, but for the same reason scientists keep lab notes—as a record of their thinking at various stages. Or, to use a different analogy, the purpose of art objects is like that road signs along the highway—not as objects of contemplation in their own right but as markers to tell us how far we have traveled down a given road.
If, traditionally, skill in painting requires a mastery of composition, then, as Jackson Pollock's pieces famously illustrate, we can eliminate careful composition for randomness.
Or if, traditionally, skill in painting is a mastery of color range and color differentiation, then we can eliminate color differentiation. Early in the twentieth century, Kasimir Malevich's White on White(1918) was a whitish square painted on a white background. Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1960-66) brought this line of development to a close by showing a very, very black cross painted on a very, very, very black background.A D Reinhardt is best known for his so-called "black" paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades. Among many other suggestions, these paintings ask if there can be such a thing as an absolute, even in black, which some viewers may not consider a color at all.
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| Jackson Pollock, Lucifer, Drip Painting gloss enamel on canvas, 1947 |
Or if, traditionally, skill in painting is a mastery of color range and color differentiation, then we can eliminate color differentiation. Early in the twentieth century, Kasimir Malevich's White on White(1918) was a whitish square painted on a white background. Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1960-66) brought this line of development to a close by showing a very, very black cross painted on a very, very, very black background.A D Reinhardt is best known for his so-called "black" paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades. Among many other suggestions, these paintings ask if there can be such a thing as an absolute, even in black, which some viewers may not consider a color at all.
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| A D Reinhart Abstract Paintings , Oil on Canvas 1960-66 |
Mass Production if traditionally the art object is a special and unique artifact, then we can eliminate the art object's special status by making art works that are reproductions of excruciatingly ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's paintings of soup cans and reproductions of tomato juice cartons have just that result. Or in a variation on that theme and sneaking in some cultural criticism, we can show that what art and capitalism do is take objects that are in fact special and unique—such as Marilyn Monroe—and reduce them to two-dimensional mass-produced commodities .
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| Andy Warhol, Silk Screen Painting, Marylin Three Times 1962. |
Conceptual Art If art traditionally is sensuous and perceptually embodied, then we can eliminate the sensuous and perceptual altogether, as in conceptual art. Joseph Kosuth waged an attack against conventional aesthetics.He sought to demonstrate that the “art” component is not located in the object itself but rather in the idea or concept of the work.
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| Joseph Kosuth, What Does this Mean, yellow neon on wall, 2009 |
Readymades With his urinal, Duchamp offered presciently a summary statement. He wished to de -deify art.The artist is not a great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—it is puzzling and leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. He could have selected a sink or a door-knob. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art can be a readymade object even a lowly object.The urinal is not art—it is a device used as part of an intellectual exercise in figuring out why it is not art.
Morley Safer, who covers art for CBS's "Sunday Morning," says, "It's clear beauty has no place in contemporary art." He suggests substituting "emotional and intellectual impact" as the criterion to judge quality.
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| Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, Readymade Urinal, 1917 |
Beauty is not the artist's ultimate goal. Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. Artists may express something so that their audience is stimulated in some way--creating feelings, religious faith, curiosity, interest, identification with a group, memories, thoughts, or creativity. For example, performance art often does not aim to please the audience but instead evokes feelings, reactions, conversations, or questions from the people observing. In these cases, aesthetics may be an irrelevant measure of "beautiful" art. Art may be considered an exploration of the human condition, what it means to be human.
"If you look at the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat or younger artists like Dash Snow or Barry McGee, their work is about the grit and grime of reality," says Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum. "There is beauty in it but it's harsher, rough, and in your face."
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| Jean Michel Basquiat Fishing, Graffitti, 1981 |
To assess quality in today's art, don't rely on superficial beauty. Unlike a vapid Breck-girl image, good art has got to have punch to shake us up, wake us up, and – above all – make us sit up and take notice.
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