Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

In art and in society, we commonly hear that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ugly artwork may show that we do not want to see, or what is not common for us to see in everyday; ie a woman a mustache. It can be callde ugly if we do not understand it or it is not easily intepreted.

For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the 'Isn't that disgusting' strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that 'a five-year-old could have made them,' and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the art world has been entirely unmoved. Of course, the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. Of course, a five-year old could in many cases have made an indistinguishable product. Those points are not arguable—and they are entirely beside the main question. The important question is: Why has the art world of the twentieth-century adopted the ugly and the offensive? Why has it poured its creative energies and cleverness into the trivial and the self-proclaimedly meaningless?

It is easy to point out the psychologically disturbed or cynical players who learn to manipulate the system to get their fifteen minutes or a nice big check from a foundation, or the hangers-on who play the game in order to get invited to the right parties. But every human field of endeavor has its hangers-on, its disturbed and cynical members, and they are never the ones who drive the scene. The question is: Why did cynicism and ugliness come to be the game you had to play to make it in the world of art?"