The concept's misshapenness and eccentric centre of gravity mean that even its relation to the beautiful is not cleanly binary. The concept of ugliness, though, has sufficient shape and regularity to reward the philosophical attention which these three books supply, but, as we learn in different ways from all of them, it seems to wilfully frustrate the demand for a consistent and satisfying explanation. It is a concept horribly well connected, as Mojca Küplen points out, with ideas such as "alienation, estrangement, dehumanization, destruction, degeneration, disconcertion, absurdity, and with emotions evoking terror, horror, anxiety and fear". ![]() It touches sensitive places in our psyche and culture, for example in its connection with issues of deformity, otherness and gender. The ugly sits squat and tumorous at some hidden place in our body conceptual, reaching out to unexpected points while conspicuously absent in more expected places. Ugliness, in the cry of the beholder IAN GROUND The ugly is a very intractable concept: as anomalous, messy, irregular, unsettling and ultimately unsurveyable as the phenomena it characterizes. To illustrate this, the article focuses on the particularly visceral form of ugliness that is the disgusting, through a reading Rimbaud’s Venus Anadyomene, and concludes by arguing that a better understanding of the force of disgust compels us to reconsider and rethink, if not altogether abandon, the Idealist understanding of art as the sensuous appearance of the Idea.īloomsbury Academic. Within a short space of time, however, the internal development of art would begin to challenge this primacy in earnest. And yet, so this article asks, can the ugly be understood in its full force within the paradigm of an Idealist aesthetics such as Rosenkranz espouses? Although in such a frame the ugly is not merely the absence of the beautiful, it can only ever be a secondary phenomenon which is subordinate to the sensuous appearance of the Idea Rosenkranz consequently never progressed beyond affirming the always-already established primacy of the beautiful. When, in 1853, Karl Rosenkranz published his Ästhetik des Häßlichen, the very title was indicative of the work's ground breaking nature, it being the first time that the ugly was expressly accorded some measure of dignity within the philosophy of art. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.” Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. See more at: Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty. ![]() Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation.
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