Ugliness

A Cultural History

Gretchen E. Henderson

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780235608
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Ugly as sin, the ugly duckling—or maybe you fell out of the ugly tree? Let's face it, we've all used the word "ugly" to describe someone we've seen—hopefully just in our private thoughts—but have we ever considered how slippery the term can be, indicating anything from the slightly unsightly to the downright revolting? What really lurks behind this most favored insult? In this actually beautiful book, Gretchen E. Henderson casts an unfazed gaze at ugliness, tracing its long-standing grasp on our cultural imagination and highlighting all the peculiar ways it has attracted us to its repulsion.Henderson explores the ways we have perceived ugliness throughout history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music, and even the cutest possible incarnation of the term—Uglydolls—she reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste. She moves beyond the traditional philosophic argument that simply places ugliness in opposition to beauty in order to dismantle just what we mean when we say "ugly." Following ugly things wherever they have trod, she traverses continents and centuries to delineate the changing map of ugliness and the profound effects it has had on the public imagination, littering her path with one fascinating tidbit after another.Lovingly illustrated with the foulest images from art, history, and culture, Ugliness offers an oddly refreshing perspective, going past the surface to ask what "ugly" truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift.

REFERENCES

The quotation on p. 2 is from John R. Clark, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2007), p. 65.

Introduction: Pretty Ugly: A Question of Culture

1 Sarah Kershaw, ‘Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here’, www.nytimes.com, 29 October 2008.

2 See ‘ugly’, www.oed.com, accessed 25 April 2011.

3 Kathleen Marie Higgins, ‘What Happened to Beauty? A Response to Danto’, in Beauty: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Dave Beech (Cambridge, MA, 2009), p. 34.

4 See Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, in Beauty, ed. Beech, p. 145; and John Hendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts (New York, 2004), p. 139.

5 See ‘ugly’, www.oed.com, accessed 25 April 2011.

6 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York, 1960), p. 91.

7 Voltaire, ‘Beauty’, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), quoted in Ruth Lorand, Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art (London, 2000), p. 228.

8 Umberto Eco, ‘On the History of Ugliness’, www.videolectures.net, 14 December 2007.

9 Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty (New York, 2004), p. 114.

10 Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly: Part 1’, AA Files, 1 (1994), p. 63.

11 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles, CA, 1993), p. 6.

12 See Caroline O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, Log, XXII (2011), p. 101.

13 Plato quoted in Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, eds, Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory (London, 2014), pp. 3, 9.

14 Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly: Part III’, AA Files, XXX (1995), pp. 65–8. See also O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, p. 97; and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), p. 36.

15 For background on ‘ugly feelings’ see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

16 See Gretchen E. Henderson, ‘The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity’, in Ugliness, ed. Pop and Widrich, pp. 17–33.

17 Aristotle quoted in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, 1997), p. 20.

18 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1785). See Roger Lund, ‘Laughing at Cripples: Ridicule, Deformity and the Argument from Design’, Eighteenth-century Studies, XXXIX/1 (2005), pp. 91–114.

19 See Bridget Telfer, Emma Shepley and Carole Reeves, eds, Re-framing Disability: Portraits from the Royal College of Physicians (London, 2011), pp. 20, 25.

20 Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York, 2009).

21 Jorn quoted in O’Donnell, ‘Fugly’, p. 100.

22 Quoted in Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New (London, 1972), p. 189.

23 Dunlop, The Shock of the New, p. 246.

24 Isadora Duncan, ‘The Dancer of the Future’, in The Twentieth-century Performance Reader, ed. Teresa Brayshaw and Noel Witts (New York, 2014), p. 165.

25 Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, ‘Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children’, in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Eleanor E. Maccoby, Theodore M. Newcomb and Eugene L. Hartley (New York, 1958), p. 611.

26 David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, Ugly Guide to the Uglyverse (New York, 2008).

27 See Kershaw, ‘Move Over, My Pretty’; and Ann Oldenburg, ‘The Fight for Female Self-esteem Gets Pretty Ugly’, www.usatoday.com, 21 December 2006.

28 See Katharine A. Phillips, ‘Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Distress of Imagined Ugliness’, American Journal of Psychiatry, CXLVIII/9 (1991), pp. 1138–49; Linda S. Kauffman, ‘Cutups in Beauty School – and Postscripts’, in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), p. 107; and Charles Hall, ‘Surgery as Satire’, British Medical Journal, CCCXIV/7041 (1996), p. 1308.

29 Anthony Synnott, ‘The Beauty Mystique’, Facial Plastic Surgery, XXII/3 (2006), pp. 171–2.

30 See John R. Clark, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 (Berkeley, CA, 2007), p. 64.

31 Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984), pp. 5–6.

32 Giambattista Vico, Principles of a New Science (1759), quoted in Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York, 1994), p. 9.

33 Charles Hubert H. Parry, ‘The Meaning of Ugliness’, Musical Times, LII (1911), p. 508.

34 Roger Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago, IL, 1996), p. 65.

1 Ugly Ones: Uncomfortable Anomalies

1 ‘Dumb Docs Shouldn’t Monkey Around’, Weekly World News, 8 November 1988, p. 23.

2 The caricature of Darwin appeared in The ...