The Beauty of the Ugly

The appreciation of the ugly has won over popular taste, and for many viewers, it is difficult to understand the reason for this trend.

Bacon and Picasso are two of the artists who, in the twentieth century, exploded the aesthetic canons and made us understand that the concepts of beauty and uglienss are ambiguous concepts and that the depend on the culture, the time period and the society that create them. These artists, among many others, have made it possible for the young artists of today to be ambassadors of the democratization of the ugly.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, we have been seeing a popularization of the ugly and and ugliness. Umberto Eco's book On Ugliness, the celebration of the 30 years of punk and the 10 years since the Sensation exhibition that upended the aesthetic conventions to which our society was accustomed, make us understand that the ugly is not the dark side of beauty, nor a lack of it.

The reasons for which ugliness is now accepted are varied: fatigue for the classic canon; a search for new horizons via transgression and provocation; a values crisis; development of new media like photography, television, music and Internet, that blur borders; a collective turning away from nature and imitating it in an artificial world: the influence of advertising and the way that it uses ugliness as a way of attracting attention and creating an original identity.

However we could say that love for the ugly is a symbol of our decadent culture, or a reflection of the reality we live in, and that it’s possible to follow its evolution through the entire length of Art History. The starting point was Romanticism, that exalted free forms, feeling over reason, fantasy and passion with a tragic air. From then on, beauty stops being interesting in art. The interest is not found in “real” things, but in feelings and the viewer. And on and on, until we reach the work of Damien Hirst, after passing through Kitsch and Punk.

We have learned to see the reality that surrounds us, to find new sensations in a work of art, and that is why ugliness has become normal: the beautiful is ugly, the ugly is beautiful.