The Ugly Reader: The Ugly Muse
(Part 5 of 10.)
I am not alone in appreciating ugly. The art world, always at the vanguard, has paid this subject more and more attention over the last decades. Art gets uglier and uglier all the time. For many people today, art may be the only way to experience ugliness in a pure form.
Popular culture achieves only “insincere” ugliness by creating, for example, singers who cannot express human emotion with their voices, comedies that fail to provide a semblance of funny commentary, and leading men and women who are repulsive and insufferable.
The failing of popular culture is that it does all these things, which are noble in my descriptions, sheerly by accident. It creates all this ugliness in the pursuit of beauty, and bills all this ugliness as beauty. You can see, then, why we are, as a culture, confused about the nature and role of the ugly.
That’s why recent art, with its pure and loving pursuit of the ugly, has been so important. Artists, sensitive to the increasing prevalence of ugly in our society, have captured it as many ways as there are media. A famous play, insightfully titled “Art” for easy identification, is about several ugly men treating each other in the most ugly manner possible. Recently, in the City of New York, a museum full of fabulously ugly artworks was chastised by the mayor, an ugly little man, for being too ugly. He hurled many ugly words at this museum for being a patron of the ugly, and many ugly words were then used in the press to take this ugly man to task for his ugly attitude. Politics and art, of course, are merely the pawns. The winner, regardless? Ugly. When there is a conflict, ugly is always the winner.
Why, then, do we shy from ugly? Ugly is, in all its brazen flamboyance, still rather shy itself. While being unequivocally itself, ugly does not always tip its hand. Perhaps ugly “doesn’t want to get ugly.” To which I say, ugly can only get uglier, so it is best to start now.
by Jack, October 17, 2003 7:08 PM | More from The Ugly Reader
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