Fri 4 Apr 2008
Is doing something repulsive well a valuable kind of art? What merit do you see (or not see) in refined, skillful ugliness in graphic art, music, writing? Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?
What piece of art (door wide open for what qualifies) has most struck you relevant to these questions? What has caught your eye, or makes your point?
Posted by Josh Millard5 answers so far!
I wouldn’t say it’s repulsive in the typical sense of the word, but repulsive as in it makes me cry. I’m talking about the art at exhibits where it’s an entire fucking wall of black paint with 4 random shapes and it is somehow a masterpiece. Or an mural with 14 different buckets of paint splattered everywhere. I did that in our manager’s office and had to repaint it because it was ugly. Duh.
I just don’t get it!
I’d say those black and white photos (can’t think of anyone photographer off the top of my head), which are close-ups on what we’d consider very ugly people, but the photographer has managed to turn them into something beautiful.
Also, what’s repulsive to one person may not be to another. I think it depends on the way you were raised, life experiences, etc. There’s a difference between saying “this sucks because it’s so ugly,” and “no one should be able to see it because the ugliness offends me.”
I saw a painting once of a woman seated in a chair, and she was missing her head. Behind her was a baby on a table under a glass dome. It was very Dali-esque, and somewhat reminiscent of someone’s nightmare. It was definitely repulsive but the painting was so well executed that it was fascinating at the same time.
Good article on art and ugliness here, as relates to art history and trends.
One of the purposes of art is to provoke a new way of seeing/perceiving things in the viewer/reader/listener; to that end, sometimes the depiction of ugliness is important and valuable. I am always struck by photographs that capture these ugly moments - the horror/terror on the faces of people in the aftermath of a shooting or bombing, the stark images first taken when the Allies reached concentration camps, the images of the people jumping from the WTC, etc…there is a strange fascination in seeing these absolutely horrid moments, frozen, as a reminder of all the terrible things our species can do. Photographs of beautiful people are not as hard to come by, but we need both images to truly capture what we are.
I’m talking about the art at exhibits where it’s an entire fucking wall of black paint with 4 random shapes and it is somehow a masterpiece.
There’s no such thing as “a masterpiece.” There are just works that an individual person (often an authority figure of some kind) — or a group of people — call a masterpiece. That label is only important if you care about how those people rank things. I don’t care, so I’m going to dispense with that part of your comment.
Okay, now I don’t know about you, but I can get great pleasure out of seeing — say — a striking pattern on a woman’s skirt. Or a cool design printed around the edge of a dinner plate. Why do those stripes and blobs and colors give me pleasure? I’m not sure. I could come up with all sorts of theories about how color affects the brain, but the fact is, for whatever reason, colors and shapes please me. Do they please you?
Not all colors and shapes please me equally. Sometimes, I look at a pair of socks, and I think, “those are ugly!” And I often think that because I don’t like their color. Other times, I see a chair, and I think “Wow! The color just POPS! Cool!”
But all those experiences, good or bad, are muddied by the utility of the object: skirts of for wearing, as are socks; plates are for food; chairs are for sitting in. It’s great that they’re decorated, but I can’t focus 100% on the decorations, because part of my mind is concerned with what’s being decorated.
An abstract in a museum allows me to focus on the colors and shapes by themselves. I can have a pure emotional reaction to BLACK or PINK or TRIANGLE or ROUGH or PATCHY. I’m not distracted by utility. It’s really not that different from figurative painting. I can really focus on The Mona Lisa when I see her framed in the center of Leonardo’s painting. I wouldn’t be able to focus on her as clearly if she was in a crowd of people.
If you go to a museum, stare at the “fucking wall of black paint with 4 random shapes” and feel nothing, then fair enough. Not every painting can affect everyone. And not every abstract is good. But if you go there and you’re thinking, “I could do that!” or “What a sham to call something like that a masterpiece!” or “how stupid that people pay thousands of dollars for paintings like that!” or “What is that supposed to mean?” then you have my pity.
You’re focusing on a skill contest between the artist and you; or your focusing on rank; or you’re focusing on commerce; or you’re focusing on whether or not you’re smart enough to get some hidden meaning. You’re not giving yourself the chance to just experience! To just look at it and feel. That’s too bad.
Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?
.. or none. Art is not about pleasing, neither is beauty: it’s about moving. “Unpleasant” is part of human experience, so emotions based on unpleasantness are part of any artist’s range: sadness, suffering, anguish, terror, degradation, death. Is Guernica “pleasant”?
Lucian Freud (NSFW: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=lucian+freud&um=1&ie=UTF-8 ) comes to mind. Or if you want a taste of what is really unpleasant, visit Henriette Valium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henriette_Valium (Consider yourself warned; also NSFW: http://www.henriettevalium.com/001a—msn-01.html ). Some are very (very) unpleasant (–> art –> MUTANT II). But they can be very powerful. Most of his work is about unpleasantness and ugliness. It’s not a pretty world, but it’s his world.
Sure, there is a huge difference between “what is art” and “what I would hang in my living room”. There are a lot of artists I admire but it doesn’t mean that I would want to wake up around their work. I don’t have this kind of work on my walls, but they certainly belong in museums.