Is Beautiful Bad?
Wapato, 2018
Your work is “beautiful”…
This is a common response that I get about my work. Is saying art is beautiful a (backhanded) compliment? Does it flatten the work? Make it have less depth? Is beauty a bad thing?
In thinking about beauty I also started thinking about ugliness and if that gives work more depth. In searching I found this article Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings by Katy Kelleher.
“Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other. ”
I found it extremely interesting that our neurological response to ugly and beauty lights up the same parts of our brains.
“Beauty does not occupy a different area of the brain than ugliness. Both are part of a continuum representing the values the brain attributes to them.” Although we experience them differently, beauty and ugliness both tap into our emotional center, an area deeply involved in analyzing other’s motives and actions and generating both sympathy and empathy.
