Ugliness
Related: aesthetics - bad - dirty - disgusting - freaks - grotesque - incongruity - monster - offensive - obscene - repulsive - sordidness
The Ugly Duchess (1525-30) - Quentin Matsys
Ruminations: the sublime (ugliness as aesthetic category) - the modernist cult of ugliness
"All profoundly original art looks ugly at first." --Clement Greenberg
Art movements concerned with ugliness: 20th century expressionism
Films related by title: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) - Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976)
Artists fascinated with ugliness: Diane Arbus - Nan Goldin
Famous monsters: Frankenstein (1818)
Ugliness in film: The Beauty and the Beast (1947) - Freaks (1932) - The Elephant Man (1980)
Cult of ugliness: In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The "cult of beauty" and the "cult of ugliness". He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write "Villon, Baudelaire, Corbiere, Beardsley are diagnosis." - "beauty is difficult": Cantos LXXIV, LXXX
Contrast: beauty
Boris Karloff as the monster in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein
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Definition
Ugliness is the property of physical things that are unappealing to the senses. It may indicate that something provokes revulsion or horror. The term is often used in reference to human appearance. The opposite of ugliness is beauty. Being a matter of subjective aesthetics, one person may think something beautiful that another may find ugly (as referenced in the popular phrase, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder").
Although usually thought of in its visual sense, the property of ugliness may also be ascribed to other phenomena, for example, music, literature, scientific theories, human actions, and so on. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly [Apr 2006]
The sublime
The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Burke's concept of the sublime was a stark contrast to the classical notion of aesthetic quality in Plato's Philebus, Ion, and Symposium, and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality.
See sublime.
The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (2005) - Patrizia Bettella
The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque
(2005) - Patrizia Bettella
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The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries – from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolò Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti – the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as ‘other.’
Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.
More films related to "ugliness"
- Shrek (2001) - Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson [Amazon US]
William Steig's delightfully fractured fairy tale is the right stuff for this computer-animated adaptation full of verve and wit. Our title character (voiced by Mike Myers) is an agreeable enough ogre who wants to live his days in peace. When the diminutive Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) evicts local fairy-tale creatures (including the now-famous Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and the Gingerbread Man), they settle in the ogre's swamp and Shrek wants answers from Farquaad. A quest of sorts starts for Shrek and his new pal, a talking donkey (Eddie Murphy), where battles have to be won and a princess (Cameron Diaz) must be rescued from a dragon lair in a thrilling action sequence. The story is stronger than most animated fare, but it's the humor that makes Shrek a winner. The PG rating is stretched when Murphy and Myers hit their strides. The mild potty humor is fun enough for 10-year-olds but will never embarrass their parents. Shrek is never as warm and inspired as the Toy Story films, but the realistic computer animation and a rollicking soundtrack keep the entertainment in fine form. Produced by DreamWorks, the film also takes several delicious stabs at its crosstown rival, Disney. --Doug Thomas for amazon.com