Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory

by Andrei Pop (Editor), Mechtild Widrich (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784533557
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/18/2016
Series:	International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Andrei Pop is Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, USA.

Mechtild Widrich is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

Table of Contents

Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Rethinking Ugliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Politics of Ugliness
Gretchen E. Henderson, The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Suzannah Biernoff, The Face of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Brandon Taylor, Picasso and the Psychoanalysts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mechtild Widrich, The 'Ugliness' of the Avant-garde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Experience of Ugliness
Edward Payne, Ribera's Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity . . . . .

Frédérique Desbuissons, The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kathryn Simpson, I'm Ugly Because You Hate Me: Ugliness and Negative Empathy in Oskar Kokoschka's Early Self-Portraiture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Adele Tan, From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice – the Ugly in Teo Eng Seng's D Cells . . . .


The Theory of Ugliness
Andrei Pop, Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kassandra Nakas, Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous: The 'Liquefying' Rhetoric of Ugliness . . . . .

Odeta Žukauskien?, Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds. Jurgis Baltrušaitis' Contribution to Art History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Three Definitions of Ugliness (1765, 1843, 1882) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .