Aesthetics of Ugliness: Methodological Challenges in the Definition of Ugliness

In the history of art and especially in its later periods, there have been a lot of works of art whose subject and content or materials and materials and form of execution and payment were of a type and in such a way that they were considered ugly in the conventional understanding and aesthetic traditions of the past. Many of the producers of these products and their receptive audiences, by challenging the conventional and stereotyped definitions of ugliness, have not found the considered ugly elements of such innovations to be ugly. The multitude of functions that ugly artistic or moral phenomena may have in the sensory or emotional arousal of the audience or, for example, the many political uses of the capacities of such phenomena in the demarcation of concepts and ideologies, have led to the frequent occurrence of ugliness in works of art and correspondingly or subsequently, to the redefinition of ugliness and Its philosophical and aesthetic features have led. How the contexts of common perceptions of ugliness led to the emergence of the mentioned works and how the epistemological developments regarding the definitions of beauty and ugliness allowed for the production and acceptance of these works was the subject of the present research.
Among the most important issues that new studies in the methodology of ugliness aesthetics have paid attention to and had many practical consequences in the history of art, the theoretical dependence of ugliness on beauty has been in the area of definition; Explaining that in most of the traditional definitions, originality is placed on beauty and ugliness is read only as a subsidiary and function of beauty, its opposite aspect. In the modern era, some people have defined art as eliminating and removing ugliness from phenomena and considered beauty to be an essential element of every work of art. In this combination of "beauty and art", ugliness is not only considered a part of art and is placed outside of it, which is also considered its opposite. Other associations in traditional thinking have been the correspondences of "beauty and goodness", "beauty and truth" or "beauty and nature". For example, according to the rule of benevolence of nature, natural ugliness was either completely ignored or, if this rule was deviated from, according to another rule, i.e. art's imitation of nature, any natural ugliness was also considered ugly in art. There have been many other praised concepts that are linked to the concept of beauty in a lexical network. Usually, beauty is related to the pleasant qualities and characteristics of the senses or good traits and moral virtues, and vice versa, ugliness is related to the unpleasant and vice characteristics. For example, in the old pseudo-scientific physiognomy and physiognomy, sometimes, without distinguishing between external and moral ugliness, bodily defects were considered to be related to deficiencies and moral disorder. Some ancient Greeks also believed that a beautiful soul resides in a beautiful body, and on the other hand, ugly and defective bodies and faces were considered to indicate spiritual vices. It is clear how much such beliefs may have had an effect on the face painting and drawing of people's appearance or, for example, sculpting.
In the new era, these traditional and taken-for-granted presuppositions were revalidated; For example, there was serious doubt that art should only deal with beautiful phenomena and reflect and imitate them. Based on this, art was considered to have a wide range of components and facilities, of which beauty was only one of them. In more extreme criticisms of traditional definitions, as some contemporary schools and theories or postmodernist views believed, it was said that truths and goodness can be transmitted and presented in the form of ugly art while maintaining their true and good nature. In such a view, a work may be artistically great, and at the same time, ugly. Philosophers of art and new thinkers also challenged the set of concepts and attributes that were presented in the traditional definitions for distinguishing beauty and ugliness; For example, they emphasized the vagueness and relativity of characteristics such as "proportion", "balance", or "symmetry", which traditionally and earlier were considered necessary for the beauty and pleasantness of the work and their absence as a reason for its ugliness, and they emphasized the incorrectness or impossibility of the work. Determining the geometric and algebraic values and ratios of these criteria paid attention. Among other things, they admitted that generally, in opinions that try to determine mathematical and scientific criteria for ugliness and beauty, intercultural and class differences and relativities are neglected. In the new aesthetic discourse, it was asked if it is not possible for an object or thing to be both proportional and symmetrical and not, or not to be proportional and symmetrical and neither disproportionate and asymmetrical? The same doubts about the definition and traditional interpretation of ugliness and anti-beauty were also raised and it was said that a single phenomenon may simultaneously contain beauty and ugliness with different functions. The other thing is that it was acknowledged that the things and phenomena that are called ugly or beautiful are so wide and numerous that it is very difficult to determine the commonality or commonalities in them that can be considered as the main component of their definition. .
References
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