Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art)

Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, from the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as the beautiful, and often much more of a reality - Why then has it been so neglected? This book seeks to remedy this oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, from war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminate why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice. Introduction: rethinking ugliness -- Andrei Pop and Mechtile Widrich -- 1. The Ugly Face Club : a case study in the tangled politics and aesthetics of deformity -- Gretchen E. Henderson -- 2. The face of war -- Suzannah Biernoff -- 3. Picasso and the pscychoanalysts -- Brandon Taylor -- 4. The 'ugliness' of the avant-garde -- Mechtild Widrich -- 5. Ribera's grotesque heads: between anatomical study and cultural curiosity -- Edward Payne -- 6. The studio and the kitchen: culinary ugliness as pictorial stigmatisation in nineteenth-century France -- Frédérique Desbuissons -- 7. I'm ugly because you hate me: ugliness and negative empathy in Oskar Kokoschka's early self-portraiture -- Kathryn Simpson -- 8. From political travesties to aesthetic justice: the ugly in Teo Eng Seng's D Cells -- Adele Tan -- 9. Can beauty and ugliness coexist? -- Andrei Pop -- 10. Putrefied, deliquescent, amorphous: the 'liquefying' rhetoric of ugliness -- Kassandra Nakas -- 11. Orderly ugliness, anamorphosis and visionary worlds: Jurgis Baltrusaitis' contribution to art history -- Odeta Žukauskienė Conclusion: three definitions of ugliness. "Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as beauty, and often much more of a reality -- why then has it been so neglected. This book seeks to remedy this oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, the object, from war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminated why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice."--book jacket. Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers of this volume illuminate why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice.