Dec 17, 2015 08:13 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultura...ugly-truth
EXCERPT: In her wide-ranging and frequently illuminating study, “Ugliness: A Cultural History,” published this month, Gretchen Henderson traces the connections—some obvious, but many not at all—between aesthetic norms and cultural anxieties, from antiquity to the present day. Henderson’s totemic character is Polyphemus, the half-divine Cyclops whose appearance in Homer’s “Odyssey” is one of the poem’s most harrowing episodes. Set apart by his “non-Greek race, enormous size, congenital disorder and demigod status” (or, to put it more broadly, by his difference, hybridity, and hypervisibility), the monster exemplifies the lasting tendency to equate appearance with less tangible values.
[...] I can’t remember the last time I heard one person call another person ugly. Art: sure. But when it comes to other human beings, we seem to have invested almost totally in metaphoric deployments of the word: “ugly” now describes degrading items like the steadily worsening rhetoric of Donald Trump; or, simply, sinful behavior, as in: “God don’t like ugly.” This may seem like progress, but it could also be regarded as a kind of absurd end state for Aristotelian thinking. No longer does the outward merely track the inward: by an almost forgotten transitive process, the two have become one. And so, today, ugly means evil, and the philosopher’s conflation is complete.
This creates an unnerving blind spot: What happens when evil is made beautiful?
Early in “Ugliness,” Henderson quotes Umberto Eco, who identified one problem with a too-strict association between beauty and virtue: "Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules … Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God."
[...] This wringing of sexual power out of physical nonconformity is one variant of a longstanding, and perhaps definitional, feature of black life in the West—namely, a knack for spinning lowly, even ugly, materials up and into the realm of art. [...] In a particularly exciting section of “Ugliness,” on “ugly sound,” Henderson excavates the self-contradictory but undeniable fact that aesthetic advances—discoveries of new species of beauty—have often been spurred on by ugliness. She calls attention to the composer Charles Hubert H. Parry, whose 1911 essay “The Meaning of Ugliness” asserts that “Every advance in Art has been made by accepting something which has been condemned as ugly by recognized artistic authorities.” This holds true especially well in the history of jazz, which “tangled with racial stereotypes and moral debates,” becoming, at several points, more locus for symbolic tug-of-war than free-standing artistic text. Henderson quotes the composer John Zorn on Thelonious Monk, an exemplar of ugly victory: “People used to think his playing was ugly, now it’s recognized as classic....”
EXCERPT: In her wide-ranging and frequently illuminating study, “Ugliness: A Cultural History,” published this month, Gretchen Henderson traces the connections—some obvious, but many not at all—between aesthetic norms and cultural anxieties, from antiquity to the present day. Henderson’s totemic character is Polyphemus, the half-divine Cyclops whose appearance in Homer’s “Odyssey” is one of the poem’s most harrowing episodes. Set apart by his “non-Greek race, enormous size, congenital disorder and demigod status” (or, to put it more broadly, by his difference, hybridity, and hypervisibility), the monster exemplifies the lasting tendency to equate appearance with less tangible values.
[...] I can’t remember the last time I heard one person call another person ugly. Art: sure. But when it comes to other human beings, we seem to have invested almost totally in metaphoric deployments of the word: “ugly” now describes degrading items like the steadily worsening rhetoric of Donald Trump; or, simply, sinful behavior, as in: “God don’t like ugly.” This may seem like progress, but it could also be regarded as a kind of absurd end state for Aristotelian thinking. No longer does the outward merely track the inward: by an almost forgotten transitive process, the two have become one. And so, today, ugly means evil, and the philosopher’s conflation is complete.
This creates an unnerving blind spot: What happens when evil is made beautiful?
Early in “Ugliness,” Henderson quotes Umberto Eco, who identified one problem with a too-strict association between beauty and virtue: "Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules … Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God."
[...] This wringing of sexual power out of physical nonconformity is one variant of a longstanding, and perhaps definitional, feature of black life in the West—namely, a knack for spinning lowly, even ugly, materials up and into the realm of art. [...] In a particularly exciting section of “Ugliness,” on “ugly sound,” Henderson excavates the self-contradictory but undeniable fact that aesthetic advances—discoveries of new species of beauty—have often been spurred on by ugliness. She calls attention to the composer Charles Hubert H. Parry, whose 1911 essay “The Meaning of Ugliness” asserts that “Every advance in Art has been made by accepting something which has been condemned as ugly by recognized artistic authorities.” This holds true especially well in the history of jazz, which “tangled with racial stereotypes and moral debates,” becoming, at several points, more locus for symbolic tug-of-war than free-standing artistic text. Henderson quotes the composer John Zorn on Thelonious Monk, an exemplar of ugly victory: “People used to think his playing was ugly, now it’s recognized as classic....”