Ugliness
Subtitle: the non-beautiful in art and theory
By: edited by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich
Series: International library of modern and contemporary art -- 12; International library of modern and contemporary art -- 12.
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9781780766454; 9781784533557
Subjects: Ugliness; Ugliness in art; Philosophy; Art; Aesthetics
Description: "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, the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as beauty, 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, the object, 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 illuminated 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."--book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-299) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: rethinking ugliness  -- Andrei Pop and Mechtile Widrich -- 1.; title: The Ugly Face Club : a case study in the tangled politics and aesthetics of deformity  -- Gretchen E. Henderson -- 2.; title: The face of war  -- Suzannah Biernoff -- 3.; title: Picasso and the pscychoanalysts  -- Brandon Taylor -- 4.; title: The 'ugliness' of the avant-garde  -- Mechtild Widrich -- 5.; title: Ribera's grotesque heads: between anatomical study and cultural curiosity  -- Edward Payne -- 6.; title: The studio and the kitchen: culinary ugliness as pictorial stigmatisation in nineteenth-century France  -- Frédérique Desbuissons -- 7.; title: I'm ugly because you hate me: ugliness and negative empathy in Oskar Kokoschka's early self-portraiture  -- Kathryn Simpson -- 8.; title: From political travesties to aesthetic justice:  the ugly in Teo Eng Seng's D Cells  -- Adele Tan -- 9.; title: Can beauty and ugliness coexist?  -- Andrei Pop -- 10.; title: Putrefied, deliquescent, amorphous: the 'liquefying' rhetoric of ugliness  -- Kassandra Nakas -- 11.; title: Orderly ugliness, anamorphosis and visionary worlds: Jurgis Baltrusaitis' contribution to art history  -- Odeta Žukauskienė; title: Conclusion: three definitions of ugliness.