beauty and ugliness essay

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The ugly truth: the beauty of ugliness

31 January 2013 By Stephen Bayley Ornament

The best-selling author of Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything, sees ugliness as a necessary corrective that stimulates a deeper appreciation of beauty

What is ugly? Not that magnificent power station. No, the way that Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the decrepit infrastructure of the Ruhr made sooty industry beautiful, surely?

When the designers were working on the jacket of my new book, someone suggested including a question mark after the title and giving the whole a mirror finish. Curious browsers would be immediately confronted with a deadly question. How beautiful are you? Tact prevailed and we used a scary detail from a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare instead. That was on the front. We put Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower on the back.

We all enjoy beauty. But an appreciation of ugliness is necessary to it. The beautiful and the ugly are not opposites, but aspects of the same thing. Concerned what people think about your house? Wish your partner were better looking? In dieting, getting a tan or going to the gym, choosing a Weimaraner over a rescue mutt, visiting an exhibition or shopping at Westfield, we are trying to acquire beauty to give us a personal competitive advantage. But don’t worry if you feel ugly: perceptions change.

Utopian ideals embodied by Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, once scorned, now grade II listed

In 1969, a group of London advertising folk, fatigued with the conventions of their trade, started The Ugly Modelling Agency. They wanted faces with character, not bland perfection. Look at the photographs from the time and you wonder what the fuss was about. The agency survives as Ugly Models whose clients include Diesel and Calvin Klein. Meanwhile, ever since the Francophile Nancy Mitford popularised the expression, we have had the idea of jolie-laide , a woman who can be attractive and ugly at the same time. Mitford was herself an example. So too is Jeanne Moreau.

‘Beauty’, however defined, is not necessarily attractive. And ugliness is not always repulsive. Besides, tastes change. The tides of taste go back and forth, erasing aesthetic certainties. This is a truth so disturbing that most of our assumptions about art are immediately and ruinously undermined. For example, two years before it was finished, the great Paris intellos of the day lined-up against the Eiffel Tower, writing letters to the papers denouncing it as an ugly and hateful column of bolted tin. Of course, it is now one of the world’s most loved monuments.

John Ruskin, the Victorian booster of Nature’s beauty, campaigned manically against the ugly intrusion of the steam railway into the unspoilt and tranquil Lake District. And he despised the introduction of the noisy vaporetto into the dignified Venice he regarded as his private intellectual playpen. Now we see each machine as quaint and lovely, possibly even beautiful. Back in Ruskin’s London, the Albert Memorial, now a national architectural treasure as fondly regarded as hot buttered toast and the shipping forecast, was once described as verminous and crawling.

Yet the very same Nature that Ruskin thought inevitably beautiful can be repellent. We are now required by custom to admire Alpine views, but mountains were once thought disgusting: they were dangerous, frightening and home to nasty demons and bandits. Nature can be ugly. Not all plants conform to beautiful conventions: the Amorphophallus Titanum is a vast, hideous, swollen phallic thing which stinks of death: it is known as the corpse flower.

Darwin explained our need for ‘beauty’ in saying that breeding attractive children is a survival characteristic: I, for example, may feel the need to fuse my premium genetic material with yours so that humanity continues in the same fine style. But there may be a mathematical, as well as biological, basis to the conventional ideas of the beautiful. This is what the Greeks believed: beauty can be described by numbers. Classical sculpture was based on strict ratios and Classical architecture is pleasing because its proportions are based on the field of vision of the human eye.

Discus thrower by Myron, ca 460 B.C, sculpted in the vein of anatomical perfection

These rules may still exist. I know a designer in the car industry who keeps a photograph of Claudia Schiffer’s face on his laptop. He has an app which allows him to distort the image in any dimension. This he does as a demonstration to show how at a very specific moment, what was beautiful becomes, one millimetre too far, unacceptable.

Besides measurement, another factor which changes our perceptions: time. ‘Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty, but kind to ugliness’ according to the excitable Victorian novelist Maria Louise Ramé. This might not be as mad as it first sounds. It’s beauty that is evanescent, fragile, dismaying a subject of measurements. When something becomes familiar we tolerate it and tolerance can grow into affection. And, as Serge Gainsbourg remarked, ‘ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer’. Maybe a thing of ugliness is a joy forever.

We get the word ‘ugly’ from an Old Norse word ugga which means ‘aggressive’, hence the expression an ‘ugly customer’. It’s this sense of violence that is initially disturbing, but this also means there is much more variety and surprise in ugliness. Beauty is a sedative, predictable and soothing rather than challenging. And who is to say being sedated and soothed is better than being stimulated? 

The strange truth is: too much beauty would be intolerable, an awful world of meticulously cropped lawns and starched linen. We only enjoy the ephemeral deliciousness of beauty if we have an active concept of ugliness. Heaven needs hell. Follow this argument to its conclusion and you will see that a measure of ugliness is essential to keep our appetites alive. So, exactly how much ugliness should we maintain in our world? Should we actually encourage its production? What’s the optimum exposure to ugliness? Should there be quotas? 

An even stranger truth is that ugliness fascinates. One of the most popular pictures in London’s National Gallery is by the 16th-century Flemish master Quentin Matsys. Conventionally known as The Ugly Duchess, the sitter is suffering from a bone disorder causing horrible facial deformities. In the National Gallery’s shop, the Ugly Duchess postcard sells at least as well as Claude Monet’s serene Water-Lily Pond .

The Ugly Duchess by Quentin Matsys, 1513

Ugliness deserves to be understood, but when you begin to examine it, the idea disappears. It is, for example, quite possible to look at steaming, suppurating landfill and find a thing of strange beauty. See the A38/M6 interchange from the air and it is surely a thing of transcendent beauty. That B-52? This murderous atrocity is also sublime. Equally, it is only a matter of time before the Brutalist Trellick Tower, loathed by thatched-roof sentimentalists, acquires an admired period gloss. Already it has been Grade II listed since 1998. Soon, Prince Charles will, with a tear in his eye, speak fondly of its stained concrete.

Ugly cars could once be explained by the ignorance or incompetence of their manufacturers. The AMC Gremlin and Morris Marina are just two examples from recent history, but now there is so much design competence in the motor industry that creating beauty is easy. Thus Ferrari, with impeccable credentials in the manufacture of gorgeous automobile sculpture, has not made a beautiful car for a long time: its signature curves have been stolen by Koreans. 

So, at the end of beauty’s road, Ferrari design is seeking confrontation. When Renault entered the large car market, it decided not to compete with the industry-norm of German Gute Form , but introduced the self-consciously ugly Vel Satis. In products, the iPhone’s success is to a degree based on a delicious physical appeal which can be no further refined. Whatever Apple does next, it is unlikely to be more beautiful.

Our obsession with beauty and our fear of ugliness, like so many other ‘traditions’ – cricket and public schools, for example – goes back to the middle of the 19th century. It was then that Lewis Carroll, a contemporary of John Ruskin, coined the term ‘uglification’ to describe the changes to town and country which industry had forced and which he found disturbing. Ever since, we have fretted about what is good and bad. Like it or not, we are all in a continuing debate about aesthetics. Peter Schleldahl, the US art critic said ‘Beauty is … no big deal, but the lack of it is’. Maybe, but if everything were beautiful … nothing would be.

February 2013

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The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there was revived interest in beauty and critique of the concept by the 1980s, particularly within feminist philosophy.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, 3.1 aristocracy and capital, 3.2 the feminist critique, 3.3 colonialism and race, 3.4 beauty and resistance, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or rather an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone’s particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one’s experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people’s taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [ Ennead I, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant’s Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people’s tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people’s taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume’s account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people’s taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful to what makes a critic credible. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one’s experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person’s judgment from another’s (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one’s own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana’s treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume’s and Kant’s treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave Hickey, who declared that “the issue of the 90s will be beauty” (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore’s: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid’s Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” ( Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in the Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [ Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: “And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [ Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [ Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [ Ennead I,6])

Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is, God). Shaftesbury’s character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller’s expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato’s ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including in the tripartite dialectical structure of his account—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho’s famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato’s discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho’s fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes that “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don’t stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction” (Nehamas 2007, 77).

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer’s pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his ‘compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson’s particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus’s, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its objects.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant’s Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful ” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (Bullough 1912, 244).

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon’s Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75; see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. “We call something beautiful,” writes Scruton, “when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ” (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, “but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being” (Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.

3. The Politics of Beauty

Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented philosophy.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early 20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism (ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).

Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 1844, 76). But later Marx appeared to conceive beauty as “superstructure” or “ideology” disguising the material conditions of production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in socialism.

Capitalism, of course, uses beauty – at times with complete self-consciousness – to manipulate people into buying things. Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), having survived the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early century: “To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream” (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).

Theodor Adorno, in his book Aesthetic Theory , wrote that one symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It is art’s obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of capitalism. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it with its own existence,” Adorno wrote. “Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image” (Adorno 1970, 48–9).

The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.

As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is associated with the objectification and exploitation of women. Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimké 1837).

In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of sexuality “is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content,” she continues, describing her treatment of the subject, “for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method” (MacKinnon 1987, 53–4). Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, 60).

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia (a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists, and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty “at the heart of our oppression.” And she appears to have a hedonist conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in famous nudes such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus , which a feminist slashed with knife in 1914 because “she didn’t like the way men gawked at it”.

Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth , generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the “beautiful” female body, in Western high art but especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of beauty.

The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women’s action and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Female beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone , rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our becoming” (quoted in Robinson 2000, 230).

“Sex is held hostage by beauty,” Wolf remarks, “and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film” (Wolf 1991f, 157).

Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued, devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with regard to sexualized images of women. “Some of us in America, the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the white man in color, the greater our social standing and privilege,” he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects such standards to ‘colorism’ or prejudice in the African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.

Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to oppression and resistance.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925–1965), whose parents were activists in the Garvey movement, describes ‘conking’ or straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,” he writes, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (X 1964, 56–7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards, and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was systematically developed after Malcolm’s death in the “natural” hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced around the slogan Black is beautiful . These are critiques of specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty’s power.

Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism. Edward Said famously termed this dynamic “orientalism.” Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African cultures, treating them as “exotic” insertions into Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they appropriated.

“Being a White Man, in short,” writes Said, “was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible” (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also typified by an appropriative “appreciation” of “savage” arts and “exotic” beauties, which were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)—shipping them back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects, looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin (see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.

However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression, it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the slogan “Black is beautiful” suggests. The most compelling responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise to what might be termed counter-beauties . When fighting discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).

The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how women’s beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st centuries. Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” place settings undertake to absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the objectification of the female body and to affirm women’s experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).

“Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving,” wrote philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. “Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that … beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them” (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the concept’s long journey continues.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Ayer, Alfred Jules | Burke, Edmund | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | feminist philosophy, interventions: aesthetics | hedonism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: aesthetics | Hume, David: aesthetics | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Kant, Immanuel: theory of judgment | medieval philosophy | Neoplatonism | Plato: aesthetics | Plotinus | Santayana, George | Schiller, Friedrich | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of]

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Umberto Eco on the Elusive Concept of Ugliness

Considering the relativity of beauty in human history.

Whereas in almost every century philosophers and artists have written down their ideas on beauty, important texts on the concept of ugliness amount to only a handful, one being Karl Rosenkrantz’s 1853 Aesthetic of Ugliness . Ugliness, however, has always been present as the foil to beauty—Beauty and the Beast has taken many forms. This is to say, once you set a criterion for beauty, a corresponding criterion for ugliness always seems to present itself pretty much automatically: “Only beauty orders symmetry,” Iamblichus tells us in Life of Pythagoras, and “conversely, ugliness disorders symmetry.” Thomas Aquinas teaches that three qualities are required for beauty—first among them wholeness or perfection— so that incomplete things, precisely because they are incomplete, “are ugly.” William of Auvergne adds: “We would call a man with three eyes or one eye ugly.”

Like beauty, therefore, ugliness is a relative concept.

Ugliness was defined very well by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as something that was only meaningful in the absence of money or, as we might understand his words, of power. Marx wrote:

I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. . . . I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever?

As for this last point, it is not always true—many people with money have bought only stupid people—but that’s another story. So, over the centuries, there have been many texts on the relativity of ugliness, and of beauty. In the 13th century, Jacques de Vitry wrote: “Probably the cyclopes, who have only one eye, marvel at those who have two, as we . . . judge the black Ethiopians ugly, but among them the blackest is considered the most beautiful.” A few centuries later, Voltaire wrote: “Ask a toad what beauty is. . . he will reply that it is his toad wife, with her big round eyes protruding from her little head, her broad, flat throat, her brown back. . . .Question the devil: he’ll tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws, and a tail.”

When Darwin wrote that feelings of contempt and repulsion were expressed in identical ways in most parts of the world—”Extreme disgust is expressed by movements round the mouth identical with those preparatory to the act of vomiting”—he added that, in Tierra del Fuego, a native reached out to feel the “cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.”

Are there universal ways in which people react to beauty? No, because beauty is detachment, absence of passion. Ugliness, by contrast, is passion. Let’s try to understand this point, in light of others’ earlier observations that there cannot be an aesthetic judgment of ugliness. In other words, an aesthetic judgment implies detachment. I can consider a thing to be beautiful even without feeling I must possess it. I silence my passions. It seems, however, that ugliness does imply a passion—namely, disgust or repulsion. So how can there be an aesthetic judgment of ugliness if there is no possibility of detachment?

Probably there is ugliness in art and ugliness in life. There is a judgment of ugliness as a non-correspondence to the ideal of beauty, for example, when we say that a painting of a vase of flowers is ugly. Who painted it? Hitler. We are talking about a work by the young Hitler. While instead there is a passionate reaction to what we consider to be unpleasant, repellent, horrible, disgusting, grotesque, horrendous, revolting, repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous, horrid, hair-raising, foul, terrible, terrifying, nightmarish, ungainly, deformed, disfigured, simian, bestial. . . (in the thesaurus there are more synonyms for ugly than for beautiful ).

Contrary to Plato, who said that the representation of ugliness should be avoided, from Aristotle onwards it has been admitted in all periods that even the ugliness in life can be beautifully portrayed, and that it actually serves to make beauty stand out or to support a certain moral theory. And, as Saint Bonaventure said, “ imago diabolo est pulchra, si bene repraesentat foeditatem diaboli “—the image of the devil is beautiful if it is a good representation of ugliness.

And so, art has given of its best in representing the ugliness of the devil. But the competition to portray ugliness well makes us suspect that, in reality, some have, however covertly, taken true pleasure in the horrendous, and not only in the various visions of hell. You cannot tell me that some hells were conceived only to terrify the faithful: they were also conceived to give us a hell of a kick. If we consider the various Triumphs of Death, with the beauty of the skeleton, or Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ, we can see the horrifying as a source of pleasure. Friedrich Schiller wrote in his 1792 essay “On the Tragic Art”:

It is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad, frightful things, even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible seduction, and that in the presence of a scene of desolation and of terror we feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces. . . . Any ghost story, however embellished by romantic circumstances, is greedily devoured by us, and the more readily in proportion as the story is calculated to make our hair stand on end. . . . See what a crowd accompanies a criminal to the scene of his punishment!

Consider all the countless descriptions of executions—for which there was no real call other than the enjoyment of describing an execution, because otherwise it would have sufficed to say “the guilty man was put to death.” See the Annals of Niketas Choniates for this description of the torments inflicted upon Andronikos, who was deposed as basileus of Byzantium at the beginning of the 13th century:

Bound in this fashion he was paraded before Emperor Isaakios. He was slapped in the face, kicked on the buttocks, his beard was torn out, his teeth pulled out, his head shorn of hair; he was made the common sport of all those who gathered; he was even battered by women who struck him in the mouth with theirs fists, especially by all those whose husbands were put to death or blinded by Andronikos. Afterwards, his right hand cut off by an ax, he was cast again in the same prison without food and drink, tended by no one.

Several days later, one of his eyes was gouged out, and, seated upon a mangy camel, he was paraded through the agora . . . . Some struck him on the head with clubs, others befouled his nostrils with cow-dung, and still others, using sponges, poured excretions from the bellies of oxen and men over his eyes. . . . There were those who pierced his ribs with spits.

But not even after having hung him up by his feet did the idiotic mob leave the martyred Andronikos or spare his flesh. Having torn off his shirt, they butchered his genital organs. One villain sank a long sword into his guts through his mouth, others used both hands to hold their swords aloft, and bring them down at his backside, competing over who could make the deepest cut and boasting over the best-dealt blows.

Some centuries later, in the early 1950s, Mickey Spillane, the poet of McCarthyism and master of the hard-boiled novel, tells us how private eye Mike Hammer kills communist spies in One Lonely Night :

They heard my scream and the awful roar of the gun and the slugs tearing into bone and guts and it was the last they heard. They went down as they tried to run and felt their insides tear out and spray against the walls.

I saw the general’s head splinter into shiny wet fragments and splatter over the floor. The guy from the subway tried to stop the bullets with his hands and dissolved into a nightmare of blue holes. There was only the guy in the pork-pie hat who made a crazy try for a gun in his pocket. I aimed the tommy gun for the first time and took his arm off at the shoulder. It dropped on the floor next to him and I let him have a good look at it. He couldn’t believe it happened. I proved it by shooting him in the belly. They were all so damned clever!

They were all so damned dead!

But let’s take a step back. The Greeks, by identifying beauty with goodness—kalòs kai agathòs—identified physical ugliness with moral ugliness. In the Iliad, Thersites, “the ugliest man who had come to Ilium, twisted, lame in one foot, his shoulders curved over his chest, his pointed head covered with wispy hair,” was bad. So were the sirens, who were disgusting, birdlike creatures and nothing like the sirens portrayed later by the European Decadents, who cast them as beautiful women. The harpies, who were equally ugly, were bad—and they continued to be so in Dante’s forest of the suicides. The Minotaur was hideous, too, as were the Medusa, the Gorgon, and the cyclops Polyphemus.

But, after Plato’s time, Greek culture found itself faced with a problem: how was it that Socrates, who had such a great soul, was so ugly? And why was Aesop an eyesore? According to The Aesop Romance of the Hellenic period, the fabulist was “a slave. . . of loathsome aspect, worthless as a servant, potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity.” What’s more, “he was dumb and could not talk.” A good thing he could write well.

For Christianity, apparently, everything is beautiful; in fact, Christian cosmology and theology expatiates on the beauty of the universe, so that even monsters and ugliness fall within the cosmic order, acting like chiaroscuro in a painting to make the light stand out. Countless pages have been written about this, by Saint Augustine above all. But it was Hegel who pointed out that it was only with Christianity that ugliness came into the history of art, because “Christ scourged, with the crown of thorns, carrying his cross to the place of execution, nailed to the cross, passing away in the agony of a torturing and slow death—this cannot be portrayed in the forms of Greek beauty.” Christ can only appear ugly because he is suffering. And likewise, according to Hegel, “the enemies are presented to us as inwardly evil because they place themselves in opposition to God, condemn him, mock him, torture him, crucify him, and the idea of inner evil and enmity to God brings with it on the external side, ugliness, crudity, barbarity, rage, and distortion of their outward appearance.” Nietzsche, extreme as usual, offered his own view: “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

Above all, in this ugly world, the penitential humility of the body takes on a particular value. In case you thought this was limited to medieval penances, here is a 17th-century text in which Father Segneri reports on the penances and painful self-inflicted torments of Saint Ignatius of Loyola:

wearing a garment of sackcloth over a rough hair-shirt, binding around his loins a girdle composed of prickly nettles, sharp thorns, or points of iron; fasting on bread and water every day, except Sundays, and then allowing himself no other indulgence than a dish of bitter herbs mingled with earth or ashes; passing sometimes whole days, three, six, or even eight at a time, without partaking of any food at all; scourging himself five times a day, and always to blood; cruelly beating his bare breast with a heavy stone. . . .Seven hours daily he spent in profound contemplation; his tears were unceasing, his mortifications continuous.

This was the unbroken tenor of the life he led in the cave of Manresa, which he did not moderate despite the tedious and painful infirmities that soon resulted—the “languors, swoons, paroxysms of pain, attacks of devility, and even dangerous fevers” that would eventually prove fatal.

Of course, the Middle Ages abounded with monsters, but it is our sensibility that leads us to see medieval monsters, as I noted regarding beauty, as ugly. They are strange, made with only one foot and with a mouth on their chest, well outside the norm. They are portenta, but were created that way by God to be the vehicle of supernatural meanings. Every monster comes with its own spiritual meaning. In this sense, medieval people did not see them as ugly—if anything, they saw them as interesting, fabled creatures. They saw them the way our children now see dinosaurs, which they know by heart so well that they can tell the difference between a tyrannosaurus and a stegosaurus with ease. They saw them as traveling companions. Even the dragons of the Middle Ages were viewed with this fond curiosity, because they were faithful emblems. They had a place on Noah’s ark, albeit with a deck to themselves—but still, together with animals who were not monstrous, all saved by Noah himself.

__________________________________

Excerpted from On the Shoulders of Giants by Umberto Eco. Copyright © Umberto Eco 2019. Reprinted with permission from Harvard University Press.

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• > Journals
• > Philosophy
• > Volume 72 Issue 281
• > Aesthetic Value: Beauty, Ugliness and Incoherence

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Aesthetic value: beauty, ugliness and incoherence.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

From Plato through Aquinas to Kant and beyond beauty has traditionally been considered the paradigmatic aesthetic quality. Thus, quite naturally following Socrates' strategy in The Meno, we are tempted to generalize from our analysis of the nature and value of beauty, a particular aesthetic value, to an account of aesthetic value generally. When we look at that which is beautiful, the object gives rise to a certain kind of pleasure within us. Thus aesthetic value is characterized in terms of that which affords us pleasure. Of course, the relation cannot be merely instrumental. Many activities may lead to consequent pleasures that we would not consider to be aesthetic in any way. For example, playing tennis, going swimming or finishing a book.

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1 Immanuel , Kant , The Critique of Judgement , trans. Meredith , J. C. , ( Oxford University Press , 1951 ), Book I, Section 12, p. 64. Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Kendall , Walton , ‘ How Marvellous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 59 , No. 3 , pp. 499 – 510 Google Scholar , Malcolm , Budd , Values of Art , ( London : Penguin , 1995 ), pp. 1 – 44 , Google Scholar and Jerrold , Levinson , ‘Pleasure, Aesthetic’ in David , Cooper (ed.), A Compatriot to Aesthetics ( Oxford : Blackwells , 1992 ), pp. 330 – 335 . Google Scholar

3 Monroe , Beardsley , Aesthetics ( New York : Harcourt , Brace and World, 1958 ), Section 24, pp. 456 – 470 , Google Scholar and Monroe , Beardsley , ‘ On The Generality of Critical Reasons ’, Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 59 , No. 18 , 1962 , pp. 477 – 486 . Google Scholar

4 John Constable as quoted in Leslie , C. R. , Memoirs of the life of John Constable ( 1873 ), Chapter 17. Google Scholar

5 Noel , Carroll makes a similar point about the value of horror films in his The Philosophy of Horror ( New York : Routledge , 1990 ), pp 158 – 195 . Google Scholar

6 Richard , Hülsenbeck , ‘First German Dada Manifesto (“Collective Dada Manifesto)’”, pp. 254 – 255 , Google Scholar in Charles , Harrison and Paul , Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990 ( Oxford : Blackwells , 1992 ). Google Scholar

7 Picasso as quoted in a conversation on Guernica recorded by Jermoe , Seckler in 1945 excerpted in Chipp , Herschel B. (ed.), Theories of Modern Art ( Berkley : University of California Press , 1968 ), p. 488 . Google Scholar

8 Shakespeare , , Twelfth Night ( 1601 ), Act 3, Section 1, 1. 159. Google Scholar

9 Frank , Sibley , ‘ Aesthetic Concepts ’, Philosophical Review , Vol. 68 , 1959 , pp. 421 – 450 . Google Scholar

10 See David , Hume's essay. ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ in his Selected Essays ( Oxford University Press , 1993 ), Copley , S. and Edgar , A. (eds), pp. 133 – 154 . Google Scholar

11 This kind of line is suggested by Jerrold , Levinson , ’, British Journal of Aesthetics , Vol. 32 , No. 4 , 1992 , p. 300 . Google Scholar

12 Plato , , The Republic , trans. Lee , D. , ( Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1974 ), 2nd edn, Book IV, pp. – 215 216, 1. 439e-1.440a. The italics are my own, to emphasize that Leontion delights in the sight of the corpses. Google Scholar

13 See Kendall , Walton , Mimesis as Make Believe ( Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 1990 ), p. 257 , Google Scholar and Alex , Neill , ‘ On a Paradox of the Heart ’, Philosophical Studies , Vol. 65 , 1992 , pp. 53 – 65 . Google Scholar

14 See Alasdair , Maclntyre's ‘Pleasure as a Reason for Action’ in his Against the Self Images of the Age ( London : Duckworth , 1971 ), pp. 173 – 190 . Google Scholar

15 See Berys , Gaut , ‘ The Paradox of Horror , British Journal of Aesthetics , Vol. 33 , No. 4 , 1993 , pp. 339 – 344 , makes this point in relation to our enjoyment of fearful and horrific fictions. Google Scholar

16 See David , Lewis , ‘ Dispositional Theories of Value ’, Aristotelian Society Suppl. Vol. , Vol. 63 , 1989 , pp. 113 – 137 . Google Scholar

17 Immanuel , Kant , The Critique of Judgement , trans. Meredith , J. C. , ( Oxford University Press , 1951 ), Book 1, Section 16, pp. 72 – 74 . Google Scholar

18 See Matthew , Kieran , ‘ The Impoverishment of Art ’, British Journal of Aesthetics , Vol. 35 , No. 1 , 1995 , pp. 15 – 25 , Google Scholar and ‘ Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 54 ,No. 3 , Fall 1996 . Google Scholar

19 This example was suggested to me by Roger White.

20 John , Ruskin , The Stones of Venice ( London : Smith, Elder and Co. , 1874 ), Vol. I l l , Chapter III, Section XV, p. 121. Google Scholar

21 Ibid. , Section XVI, p. 121.

22 Robert , Hughes , ‘The Decline of the City of Mahagonny’ in his Nothing If Not Critical ( London : Collins Harvill , 1990 ), pp. 3 – 28 . Google Scholar

23 Plato , , The Republic , trans. Guthric , W. K. C. , ( Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1956 ), Book X, pp. 4 21 – 439 . This paper is a heavily modified version of one presented at the Flemish Society of Aesthetics conference in Antwerp, 26–29 September, 1996, in whose proceedings a summation of the earlier version is due to be published. I would like to thank all those present, and Roger White, for their helpful comments. Google Scholar

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• Volume 72, Issue 281
• Matthew Kieran (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100057077

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Aesthetic Realism Online Library

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

A PERIODICAL OF HOPE AND INFORMATION

NUMBER 1691. —May 2, 2007

Aesthetic Realism was founded by Eli Siegel in 1941.

Ugliness, Beauty, & Appreciation

Dear Unknown Friends:

We have been serializing a work Eli Siegel wrote in the late 1950s: The Opposites Theory . Vivid, rich in scholarship, it illustrates a principle central to Aesthetic Realism, which he was the philosopher to state: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” Chapter 6 is about the opposites of Beauty and Ugliness; and we publish the first half of that chapter here.

Since Mr. Siegel wrote The Opposites Theory , art has included the ugly, the repellent, even the terrifying, more and more—as he said it would. And the question arises: If a writer or painter or filmmaker can deal with the ugly in such a way that art comes to be, does that fact say anything about ourselves? Can we look at what may be amiss, unjust, selfish, ethically wrong in ourselves ? Can we look at it so truly that the procedure is artistic and the upshot is beautiful: a greater pride, a better self? Yes! The study of Aesthetic Realism enables that to happen in people’s lives every day.

Recently, a letter came to this periodical that is really an asking, How can one look beautifully and accurately at something not beautiful in the human self? So I’ll comment on it a little here.

How Should We See Appreciation?

The letter writer, whom I do not know, is a physician, and he describes in some detail “two interactions,” requesting that I discuss them from the point of view of Aesthetic Realism. He presents the situations theoretically. But they’re about a subject which has made for confusion, discomfort, anger, and shame in people every day, and which I’m sure affects the letter writer, as it does everyone, in a way that’s not just theoretical. Meanwhile, the subject itself, despite the trouble about it, is one of the loveliest in the world: appreciation .

Here, in an abbreviated form, is the first instance the letter writer gives: You go out of your way to hold a door for a person you don’t know. However, the person simply proceeds to walk through it—without any acknowledgment or thanks.

Then, the second instance: An acquaintance speaks to you about a financial problem that distresses him, and you recommend a financial professional whom you value. Months later, you learn that this professional did indeed rescue him from his difficulty—yet the acquaintance has never told you so, never expressed gratitude to you.

The letter writer asks: Should you expect to be thanked, or simply be gratified because you did what seemed right? And he asks how Aesthetic Realism principles explain these situations.

Always, Self & World

So I begin with this principle, stated by Eli Siegel—“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves”—and say that the biggest opposites in everyone’s life are Self and World. The constant mistake of everyone is to be disproportionate about these opposites: to make ourselves, and what we think should come to us, more important than what other things and people deserve. That is so as to this matter of appreciation: we’re usually much more concerned with whether we’re appreciated than in whether we ourselves appreciate rightly.

Certainly it would have been good for the people the letter writer describes to have shown their appreciation. But one ordinary form the disproportion between self and world takes is: an individual may be so involved in something which concerns him, that he’s not much aware of another person—including that other person’s holding a door for him. Or an individual may be so troubled about something, including something financial, that he has made the existence of someone else—even someone who assisted him—dim.

It’s also true that we can feel keenly someone’s lack of thanks to us , yet not be interested in giving full reality to the tumult within that person. We don’t want to see as real the fact that he’s affected by ever so much besides us, that he is a continuing drama of hopes and fears.

The Principle of Contempt

So we come to another Aesthetic Realism principle, stated this way by Eli Siegel: “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.” Contempt is the beginning of all injustice. And it’s very easy to have: by simply giving less reality to something or someone than we give ourselves. Our contempt causes that disproportion between what’s coming to ourselves and what other things deserve. For someone not to express thanks is often contempt. But it’s also contempt if we’re more interested in being thanked than in understanding a person.

The pain about this subject is terrific. All over America, wives are resentful because they feel their husbands don’t appreciate them, and husbands are resentful because they feel their wives don’t appreciate them . Both have a point. But both usually make what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the terrible mistake of being quite uninterested in where don’t I appreciate sufficiently? Where have I not wanted to see, value, know?

Bluntly: we should be much more worried about whether we ourselves value truly than whether we’re appreciated. How much we like ourselves depends on how just we are—how authentically we value things. If we’re not just, we can get all the “appreciation” in the world, and we still won’t like ourselves.

Here are some further ethical and aesthetic points arising from the communication I received:

What Was Going On in Him?

The man, told of, who had financial distress—what was going on in him? Was he so embarrassed and pained, that when his situation became better he wanted to “put it all behind him,” forget everything about it, including someone who’d advised him? Therefore he did not speak further about it with that advising person? Such a state of mind may not be praiseworthy, but it is something to want to understand.

If we’re useful to someone, what should be our purpose: to have a good effect—or to be liked, admired, thanked? It should be the first. Meanwhile, if we do something good and another person is ungrateful—does his ingratitude hurt him ? A phase of our insufficient depth about people is: we’re generally not interested in whether someone’s unjust valuing of us hurts the person himself. And it does. In his great 1950 lecture Aesthetic Realism and Appreciation , Mr. Siegel explains: “When a person doesn’t like himself, one of the chief reasons is that he has failed to appreciate what he should appreciate” (TRO 672).

As I said, I don’t know the person who wrote the letter I’m discussing, and so I don’t know how much and in what ways what I’ll now describe applies to him. It happens that we can go after feeling unappreciated as a means of evading something we are asking of ourselves: that we be fairer to people and the world in all its largeness. We can do favors for others, and yet have thoughts about people which we’re ashamed of. We’ve looked down on people; we’ve wanted them to trip up. We don’t like ourselves for this. And unless we want, and know how, to ask courageously, “Am I proud of how I see people?”—we’ll go after evidence that we’re unappreciated.

The Economy Is There

Since the letter writer is a physician, I must mention something else too. The profit system at the basis of our present economy muddles profoundly the way every person sees others and feels he or she is seen by them. To look at one’s fellow humans in terms of how much profit one can make from them is contempt. And all over America people know they’re looked at that way, and also feel impelled to see others that way. In the medical field the trouble is huge.

To want to be of tremendous use to a person—to use oneself to have a person be healthy, even to have the person live—and at the same time be in such a position that one inevitably thinks about how much money one will make from the person: this affects doctors very much, and more than they see. It can intensify a tumult around the question, How do I see other people and how do they see me?

Eli Siegel once described Aesthetic Realism as “a course in honest world appreciation” (TRO 672). That is the course every person most wants to take, because it is also a course in how, honestly, to like ourselves.

— Ellen Reiss , Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education

Ugliness & beauty in oneness, by eli siegel.

The world doesn’t seem to be all of a piece, for while the handsome and sublime are in it—mountain peaks still go towards the skies, towards sunrises and sunsets—it is also quite observable that the misshapen, the broken, the ugly, the disgusting, the repulsive, the unendurable are there. The world seems to be an indefinite, endless compound of the ugly and pretty, the abominable and the beautiful. In philosophic terms, the world is not only Order but Disorder; not only Law but Unnerving Caprice; (or, getting back to the strictly philosophic,) not only A Priori but A Posteriori.

At this moment, the abidingly abstract is of the universe as a rusty forgotten pin is. It is arresting, this.

Art, being reality shown as it wholly is, has had to keep up. Consequently, while art has searched for the beautiful, it has included the ugly. The symmetrical alone has not been hunted for; hunted, too, has been the judiciously asymmetrical. And deep within man has been the feeling that the ugly and beautiful were closer than they seemed; that, perhaps, they were serving the same thing; that they—the ugly and beautiful—were of one reality stock.

Thought of how ugliness shows beauty is with us now, intensely, in many places. Beckett, Genêt, Soutine are three contemporary examples of the courting by art of the ugly. There are many others.

Summarily: the history of art and the history of art criticism contain a tendency to join the pleasant and unpleasant, the serene and painful, the soothing and unsettling: beauty and ugliness. The tendency to join beauty and ugliness is, according to the Theory of Opposites, based on the deep fact that they are one.

The Composed Assertion of Ugliness

Beauty is the composed assertion of ugliness, as the number 1 is the composed assertion of 2/17, 1/3, 1/51, 1/2, 1/34; for 1 is, in its serenity, 102/102. Ugliness has to do with the fragmentation, fractionality, brokenness, vicissitude, subtraction, division, addition, multiplication, alteration within beauty as a whole, or one. However this may be, it is clear that art has had in it a tendency to bring the ideal and the grotesque together, the “perfect” and the imperfect, the orderly and the disorderly.

Notable in the history of the making one of beauty and ugliness is the essay by Charles Lamb on Hogarth 1 — which appeared in The Reflector of 1811. Lamb doesn’t go as far—hardly—as what we can see today, but there are beginnings in his essay: beginnings presented consciously.

In the relation of beauty and ugliness, we should see the relation of the serious and the ludicrous. The serious, of course, is not exactly what beauty is, but there is something comely—not deformed—in the serious. Classic tragedy is serious, sad; but mighty orderly. As soon as, with Elizabethan tragedy, with Shakespeare conspicuously, the comic got into tragedy, there was a dent in what forbade seriousness and laughter to be together, in what rejected the keeping company of the orderly and disorderly. (Beauty is as much a dent in what is denied as it is a presentation of the permitted. As in mathematics, the negative is present in beauty.)

The gravedigger in Hamlet is an important figure in the making of the Tragic and Laughable one, in the making of Symmetry and Asymmetry, Beauty and Ugliness one.

Retrieving Lamb. In the essay “On the Genius and Character of Hogarth,” there is this sentence:

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake’s Progress , we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. 2

At this point, it should be noted that one of the aspects of romanticism is the getting closer of the high and low, the mighty and “unimportant,” the grand and silly, the magnificent and grotesque. We find this in Wordsworth’s dealings with donkeys and idiot boys and porringers; in Scott’s getting in of queer, dazed, disorderly figures in his novels, like Dugald Dalgetty, Dandie Dinmont, Meg Merrilies, and many more; in some of Coleridge’s subjects and ways. And we find the romantic honoring of the low and unshapely in the criticism of Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Hunt.

Constantly in Lamb’s criticism is the restoration of the forgotten unhandsome. In the sentence I have just quoted, which finds an artistic kinship between the ludicrous and the terrible, a way of romantic criticism is to be seen.

Like Imagination Anywhere

Lamb writes with intensity of that work of Hogarth having the somewhat indecorous title of Gin Lane . Of this print, Lamb says, after comparing Hogarth with Poussin:

There is more of imagination in it—that power which draws all things to one,—which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells . [Pp. 95-96]

Gin Lane , or no, Lamb says imagination here is like imagination anywhere. Imagination couples the low and high. We don’t have to agree with Lamb as estimator to see that there was in his critical purpose, critical impulse, that which lessened the distinction between the comely and the improper.

According to Lamb, the comic can be used deeply or superficially; and when the comic is used deeply, why, the comic is in the field of the important, the beautiful. The comic, like other things, has its aesthetic gradations.

But merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twiformed births, disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, perpetually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that the poet or painter shews his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet , the Fool in Lear , have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt? [Pp. 99-100]

Two Ways with the Comic

The comic, Lamb sees as mattering, as a mental force in the world. There is a noble way of seeing the comic, a profound way of seeing the ludicrous. And there is a way not honoring sufficiently the idea of the comic. Lamb compares Hogarth’s prints to the “droll productions” of Bunbury:

But in all of them will be found something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. [P. 100]

And then Lamb, writing of Hogarth’s faces, is passionately philosophic:

They are permanent abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal classes. [P. 101]

I have mentioned the tendency in romantic criticism to honor the low, disorderly, unseemly in art. It is interesting that in this essay, to sustain his approach to Hogarth, Lamb quotes a passage from Coleridge’s The Friend . In Coleridge’s dealing with Rabelais, Don Quixote , and Shakespeare, enough can be found to make it clear that the Coleridgean criticism wishes to honor the unshapely, unsymmetrical, unlooked for and low in the world and thought.

The art of today has gone beyond Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt in their approach to form and disorder. Romantic critical principles are, however, still alive, still essentially serviceable. The questions that Lamb and Coleridge raised as to why the out-of-bounds and disorderly are part of the power of Shakespeare and all art, are—in an earlier form—the question of today. Today the question has taken the form, How can the personally repulsive, the disgustingly fearful, become art, be at one with structure, design, accuracy, aesthetic consequence? Many painters, sculptors, writers of verse, dramatists are busy with this problem. We have domineering ladies with erysipelas, syphilitic Southern idiot boys, cripples of all kinds acting as tragic chorus, the affirmation of visceral complaints, philosophic lodgments in ash cans, freezing homicides, multitudinous, desperate and unappealing—often—sex, dermatological mishaps, death and death, vacuity, conqueringly oppressive trivia; all the panoply and shock and weariness of ugliness let loose. But art can be about always.

1 William Hogarth (1697-1764) is best known for his satirical paintings and engravings. ‑Ed.

2 The Works in Prose and Verse of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press, n.d.), I, 93.

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Department of Art History

Aesthetics of ugliness.

Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition 

From the publisher :

In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes  Aesthetics of Ugliness , published four years before Baudelaire's  Fleurs du Mal , hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty. Translated into English for the first time,  Aesthetics of Ugliness  is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly.

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Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China

The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life

Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures

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Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence 

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Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli

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«Di molte figure adornato»: L’Orlando furioso nei cicli pittorici fra Cinque e Seicento. Milano: Officina Libraria, 2015.

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En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I

Contemporary Chinese Art

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Raoul Hausmann et Les Avant-Gardes 

Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (Laura Giles and Claire Van Cleave), Yale University Press, 2014

Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture,

Kunst und Archäologie der griechischen Welt: Von den Anfängen bis zum Hellenismus

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Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

Sabine Moritz: Limbo 2013

Capital Culture : J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience

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Seeing Through Race

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Seeing Madness, Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture

A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture

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Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England

Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi

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Critical Terms for Media Studies

The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes

Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture

Gerhard Richter: Early Work 1951-1972

Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era

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Looking and Listening in 19th Century France (With Anne Leonard)

The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age 

Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

The Writing of Modern Life: the Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850-1940 

The Late Derrida

How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

Severan Culture

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text 

On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture

What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images

Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation

Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space

Neo Rauch: Renegaten

Die Illustrierten Homilien des Johannes Chrysostomos in Byzanz 

Chicago Apartments: A Century of Lakefront Luxury

Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress

The Name of the Game: Ray Johnson's Postal Performance

Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E.

Landscape and Power

Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections

Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance

Stress and Resilience: The Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem

Joseph Beuys

The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

Exhibiting Experimental Art in China

Wols Photographs

Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages;  

Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun

Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at the University of Chicago

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting

The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon

Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller

Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire A.D. 100-450

Rural Scenes and National Representation, Britain 1815-1850 

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting

The Art of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone: Between Dialect and Language Volume II

The Art of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone: Between Dialect and Language Volume I

Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde

Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation

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Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity

Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education

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Art and the Public Sphere

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Kilowatts and Crisis: Hydroelectric Power and Social Dislocation in Eastern Panama

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Munch: His Life and Work

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The Language of Images

Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry

Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum

The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan

Baudelaire on Beauty and Strangeness

By maria popova.

“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1855 as he contemplated what beauty is and how it enchants us . That selfsame year, on the other side of the Atlantic, another poet laureate of art’s intersection with philosophy was puzzling over the same subject from the same angle.

In an essay about Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1855, found in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature ( public library ), the great French poet, essayist, and critic Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821–August 31, 1867) made an elegant case for why the interestingness of irregularity is precisely what lends beauty its allure.

Baudelaire writes:

Beauty always has an element of strangeness. I do not mean a deliberate cold form of strangeness, for in that case it would be a monstrous thing that had jumped the rails of life. But I do mean that it always contains a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness, and that this form of strangeness is what gives it the right to be called beauty. It is its hallmark, its special characteristic. Reverse the proposition and try to imagine a commonplace beauty! And how could this necessary, incompressible, infinitely varied strangeness, dependent upon environment, climate, habits, upon race, religion and the temperament of the artist, ever be controlled, amended, corrected by utopian rules, excogitated in some little temple or other of learning somewhere on the planet, without mortal danger to art itself? This element of strangeness which constitutes and defines individuality, without which there is no beauty, plays in art (and may the precision of this comparison excuse its triviality) the role of taste or flavouring in cookery; if the individual usefulness or the degree of nutritious value they contain be excepted, viands differ from each other only by the idea they reveal to the tongue.

In another essay from the same volume, Baudelaire revisits the subject of beauty from the perspective of culinary metaphor:

Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly indispensable Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature with Susan Sontag on beauty vs. interestingness , poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on beauty and desire , Ursula K. Le Guin on what beauty really means , and Frida Kahlo on how love amplifies beauty , then revisit Baudelaire’s timeless, acutely timely open letter to the privileged and powerful about the political and humanitarian power of art.

— Published August 31, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/08/31/baudelaire-beauty-strangeness/ —

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Beauty & ugliness : and other studies in psychological aesthetics

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Stop Calling My Daughter Pretty

T he other week, my four-year-old daughter and I were going to her swimming lessons, when a man came up to us in the gym and exclaimed: “What pretty girls!”

“Mama, what did he say?” my daughter asked, her strawberry blonde hair falling in her face. “He said he likes your hat,” I lied. I didn’t want her to know how he was looking at us, how his assessing gaze had combed over our features and found them satisfying. I didn’t want her to feel proud of that label: pretty. 

My daughter has already begun receiving compliments from strangers on her blue eyes and big smile. Despite the fact that I adore her face beyond words, it does make me mildly uncomfortable to hear these things from people in passing.

When I was a child, I thought being pretty was an important currency, one that could be potentially traded for power, money, or happiness. I was told I had some; I wanted more. My mother helped, taking me to a salon at age 12 to get my hair highlighted, buying me fashionable clothes, encouraging me to take perfect care of my nails and skin, like she did. I don’t blame my mother for raising me how she did, though at times I do feel resentful of how much the word “pretty” has ruled my life—how thoroughly her declarations of my attractiveness shaped my self-conception; how powerless I felt when I thought I was “not pretty enough.”

To be pretty is a privilege; we’ve all come to realize that. But it’s also a liability. It arrives on one's doorstep, a neat package tied with a ribbon, stuffed with resentment and bile, expectations, and justifications.

The word pretty is like glitter. It shimmers, but it also invades. 

This isn’t a new concept— that the weight of the word “pretty” is too much for a child to hold. I’m old enough to remember when poet Katie Makkai went viral for her performance of “Pretty” back in 2007. She described how her “poor mother” went about “fixing” her looks to give her an advantage in life, a “marketable facade.” I was 20 when this video began circulating in my corner of the internet, and I remember watching it again and again to absorb her righteous anger.

I’m 37 now and I see the same sentiments echoed on TikTok, young women frustrated with the ugliness of being pretty. Recently, influencer Caroline Lusk has gotten some blowback for daring to call herself “pretty,” which inspired her to post about all the times that men have harassed her. “Their excuse for all of those actions is because they think I’m pretty,” she says. “It’s a compliment,” she sarcastically continues, but not one that she can repeat or accept. “I’m a bitch if I do.”

From a young age, we train girls to accept compliments with deflection, to be nice and polite, to appreciate the attention without appearing to enjoy it. It’s a thin line we expect them to walk. And whether or not we intend to, we teach our daughters to navigate this world through our own actions. My mother watched her mother do her makeup and act demure around men; my daughter watches me brush on my mascara and try to shrug off catcalls with a joke and a laugh. 

Multiple studies that came out around the wake of the #metoo movement indicated that the negative consequences of objectifying young women may run deeper than expected. Harassment, which can include supposedly complimentary statements like those detailed by Lusk, can cause pre-teen and teen girls severe mental distress, increasing their likeliness to self harm, engage in disordered eating, abuse substances, and experience suicidal ideation.

Read More: Survivors Used #MeToo to Speak Up. A Year Later, They’re Still Fighting for Meaningful Change

Of course, not all compliments are harassment, and to comment on another person’s looks isn’t always abuse. But the point is that it can be . 

Women and femme-presenting people are often subjected to this kind of attention, and it doesn’t matter whether they are conventionally attractive. It can happen to anyone, though whether or not we’ll be believed is always up in the air. People who are deemed pretty tend to be considered more credible when reporting abuse, while those seen as less desirable tend to be dismissed. This is a function of pretty privilege, but what a sad perk it is. Citing the recent online discourses about “pretty privilege,” Guardian columnist Moira Donegan notes that while pretty people do get more status in some ways, these gifts are given “in a very ambivalent way.” She told me, “It’s ‘privilege’ that requires sacrifices of time, money, health, and self respect, and which makes the recipient complicit in broader misogynist value systems.” 

The problem, ultimately, is that the power given by anointing someone “pretty” does not make up for the pain that comes from subscribing to this measurement of value. And even if you prefer not to elevate “pretty,” the sheer repetition of that idea, the reinforcement of the concept that pretty matters— this begins to feel true on a deeper emotional level. Social constructs are difficult to resist precisely for this reason: they appear endless, infinite, and we inhale them like smoke. 

And then I think back to that man in the gym. Or the people that give my daughter compliments. It turns out they’re not the real issue. The most insidious messaging comes from television and movies, from the endless parade of girls in gowns depicted in highly gendered children’s shows. Of course, we can watch Bluey instead of Princess Power, but I won’t deny her the classics. We watch Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella , just like most households. And I try to focus my attention on the gorgeous illustrations rather than fixating on the skinny blondes that flit across the screen. I try to direct her attention to other aesthetic triumphs, too, ones located outside the human body and its depictions. “Look at that castle,” I sigh to her, hoping some of my love for architecture will be passed on, or maybe my interest in plants. “Do you recognize those flowers?”

One can claim prettiness or refuse prettiness, but neither of these actions will shatter the force of lookism. Instead of focusing our resistance on the word pretty, what if we ignored it entirely. What if we deflated the word, took the power out of it, and replaced it with other compliments. What if we stopped ranking women by numericals, stopped telling strangers what we thought of their faces. What if, instead, we divert our attention to other, more interesting pursuits.

At the end of her poem, Makkai imagined a conversation with her “some-day daughter,” who wants to know if she’s going to be pretty. “The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters,” she spat into the mic, bestowing this angry blessing on her audience. 

I’ve held onto those words—I want all of us to be more than simply any one thing. Not just for our children, but I’m starting there. Raising a child with an intrinsic, expansive sense of self worth is no small task. But it’s where I can place my energy right now. And that feels good enough.

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Beyond Beauty and Ugliness

2023, Global Journal of Research in Education & Literature

In this essay, I outline a way to see the history of art as movement beyond the aesthetic distinction between beauty and ugliness. In this way, dualities are transcended. Modern art and in particular, the abstract involves the move away from mimetic reality or traditional extra-aesthetic concerns, toward a new aesthetic which one could argue continued in the work of Conceptual art and the very dematerialization of art. This, together with the rise of the post modern led to the argument that art and life are a continuum, that life itself may be experienced as art provided one house a certain awareness which is described in brief in the foregoing.

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Halsall et all eds. Special Edition of the “Journal of Visual Art Practice” Susan Best, ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-aesthetic Tradition in late-modern art’ Anna Dezeuze, ‘Everyday life, “Relational Aesthetics”, and the “Transfiguration of the Common-Place”’ Riikka Haapalainen, ‘Contemporary Art and the Role of Museum as Situational Media’ Andy Hamilton, ‘Indeterminacy and Reciprocity: Contrasts and Connections between Natural and Artistic Beauty’ Joanna Lowry, ‘Putting Painting in the Picture (Photographically)’ Toni Ross, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”’ William P. Seeley, ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Art and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision’ Jeremy Spencer, ‘Body and Embodiment in Modernist Painting’

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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

<< Previous page

Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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The Price of Perky Boobs

By Beatrice Hazlehurst

“Look at my boobs and tell me what you think.”

I’m a 20-year-old retail assistant, beseeching an older colleague and close friend, to evaluate my bare breasts in the backroom after hours. Unbuckling my bra, I stand before her, totally exposed. “What are you talking about?” She responds. “They’re fine!” After years of self-critiquing, I wasn’t convinced.

While the perceived ‘perfect’ size of breasts have fluctuated with time, breasts have always been beholden to one immovable standard: perky. Those with breasts that align with this archetype may consider their boobs a source of #freethenipple empowerment. Other women feel a kind of wearied distaste for their tatas; forgoing a bra is inconceivable, and god forbid they go on top. Some have embraced a kind of ‘it-is-what-it-is’ booby ambivalence.

I spent several college summers fitting bras at a contemporary lingerie chain—measuring breasts, buckling brassieres and at times, literally lifting flesh into cups—so I have met all these women. I have been them, too. When the pandemic found me in my mid-20s – prompting a massive lifestyle shift and a discovery of disordered eating. I’d moved to the west coast and, without daily walking around New York City, took up running and downloaded Noom, a calorie counter app that promptly capped my daily intake at 1200 calories. (Editor’s note: Research has shown that calorie tracking, including with apps, may contribute to eating disorders.) Within three months, my breasts descended four bra sizes, taking my nipples with them. With that, my boobs entered their new, deflated era, and for the first time, I felt incentivized to confront the issue.

I was not the only one to recently research breast lifts —the number of people searching for them peaked during summer 2021, and has continued to spike each summer since, according to Google Trends. It’s coincided with the arrival of Ozempic , forcing women—and myself—into the same societally-constructed conundrum. Weight loss? We like it. Small, saggy breasts caused by weight loss? Unacceptable. From 2019 to 2023, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons says there was a 30 percent increase in requests for breast lifts (mastopexies)—placing the procedure in direct competition with its more popular sister: implants. “I want my titties pinned back to my shoulders, right where they used to be,” Rihanna revealed in last month’s issue of Interview . “I don’t want implants. I just want a lift.”

New York-based board-certified plastic surgeon Norman Rowe has made his name on the Upper East Side and beyond as a breast expert. In the past year, his requests for lifts have almost tripled—an exponential increase that he says is a result of rampant semaglutide use."

“I get a lot of women who've lost a substantial amount of weight, especially with Ozempic ,” he says. “The more weight someone loses—and the quicker they lose it—the more impact that has on the skin. Body procedures are just going through the roof, 30 percent of our business is now dedicated to face, breast and back lifts.”

When I first consulted with Dr. Rowe for a breast lift , he sketched the anchor-like incision required. He would cut around the areola, down the center of the breast, removing excess skin and raising the nipple so it no longer faces down. This would not create cleavage or add fullness. For that, he emphasized, you need an implant.

“A lift will take care of the sag in the skin, it will take care of the position of the nipple, but it will not address the volume loss of the upper poles of cleavage,” he says. (“Upper poles” is how plastic surgeons refer to the breast tissue above the nipple.) Patients often come in without realizing the limitation of a breast lift, says Dr. Rowe. “There is a misconception among patients of what a lift is. So I figured out the way to ask if they wanted an augmentation or a lift was, ‘Do you want cleavage ?’ Either you want to get bigger and your cleavage to change, or you want to be the same size but get rid of the droopiness.”

I fit into the latter group, or so I thought. Anyone who remembers the 90s will also remember that buxom beauties were not only abundant but considered femininity made manifest. Even if you joined in on the bimbo jokes that shamed the cosmetically enhanced likes of Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra, their perfectly rounded, perky breasts were still taped to the bedroom walls of your school crush. Anything less than a squeeze-worthy palmful, anything that succumbed to gravity, would be passed over by Playboy editors—relegated instead to the readership of National Geographic.

In the weeks leading up to my surgery, I would debate the pros and cons of implants over and over again. Like Dr. Rowe, I was struggling to understand my expectations. Due to their generally higher placement, my nipples would be raised only an inch. With the removal of skin, my 34D boobs would likely decrease by a half or a whole cup size. Was it worth going through all of this, just for slightly smaller tits with slightly higher nipples? Would I be satisfied with, well, a slight difference?

By Aliza Kelly

By Nicola Dall'Asen

By Elizabeth Siegel

This was also plaguing Dr. Rowe, who responded to my initial consultation with multiple surgical plans. “One of the key things that I try to ascertain when I'm examining a patient: what are their true expectations and, more importantly, are they realistic for the patient?”

When Dr. Rowe first opened his private practice in 2004, he was routinely implanting 500 and 600cc implants—for reference, one cup size is around 250cc. With larger implants dropping faster, creating sagging, he says women have trended smaller in the last five years. Fat transfer enhancements, popular among those seeking natural-looking breasts, can calcify into hard lumps and be mistaken for cancer during mammography—resulting in additional surgery. The complications and shelf lives associated with implants have also become more well-known : follow-up implant removal or replacement surgeries after 10 years or sooner, and ruptured implants need to be replaced in up to 17.7% percent of patients after 6 or 10 years (the rupture rate after revision augmentation is between 2.9% and 14.7%). Breast implant illness is a controversial topic—it’s a term patients came up with, rather than a medical diagnosis; there’s a lack of data on the topic; and no real agreement about what the symptoms are, though patients tend to name hard-to-track ones, like fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, rash, memory loss—but the FDA and many doctors agree there’s still much to learn, Grant Stevens, the president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) and a clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, previously told to Allure .

Still, the promise of built-in cleavage was tempting. I wanted to go braless without insecurity. Wear plunging dresses without experimenting with endless sticky cutlets. I didn’t want to tug up my breasts in tight tops. At the same time, I didn’t want to go bigger, and I didn’t want to possibly undergo multiple surgeries on my breasts as I aged. My heart just wasn’t in the implants.

“Whereas I used to do a lot of breast implant mastopexies—where you put in the implants at the same time—today, I'm probably doing a larger number of mastopexies [breast lifts] alone,” he says.

Post-consultation, the options Dr. Rowe offered me were a mastopexy with a small implant or a mastopexy with an internal bra. The internal bra is a lesser-known procedure that originated in the ‘80s, reaching wider awareness more recently, Rowe says, with the help of a rebrand and big marketing push . Originally, the internal bra was a kind of cone shape (picture Madonna) created from a Gore-tex mesh. Over time, there were claims the mesh may have been obscuring mammography, and insurance companies began rejecting claims for mammograms if the patient had an internal bra. That’s where Galaflex came in. A new internal bra material first implemented around 2016, it’s best described as an absorbable mesh sewn into the chest wall.

“Think of it as a hammock,” says Dr. Rowe. “It goes underneath the implant [around existing breast tissue] and keeps it from descending over time. You don't need a full cone because you’re not pulling anything up—but you are protecting the implant from moving down after two years. You have your own sling.”

A lot of breast surgeries rely on skin to hold up an implant or (in the case of a lift-only) breast tissue, Dr. Rowe explained to me, but skin is not capable of bearing weight. Someone who has skin that has been stretched from rapid weight loss is a perfect candidate for an internal bra because that stretching of the skin weakens the layer of collagen that’s usually a built-in structure to prevent descent. But after Galaflex dissolves, in about 1-2 years, “it gets replaced by collagen — which would not have been there otherwise,” says Dr. Rowe, an assessment validated by studies published in the journals Aesthetic Surgery ( in 2022 and 2016) and Plastic and Aesthetic Research . “While the internal bra itself is gone, its impact remains.”

This was enough to convince me to get an internal bra, which starts at $10,000 at Dr. Rowe's practice, making the cost of a breast lift with an internal bra $40,000 and up. While I was assured the results of an internal bra are not permanent—Dr. Rowe said I could expect them to last for at least 10 years—it does make it less likely for the breasts to droop over time. And an internal bra is less likely to interfere with breastfeeding—something that may or may not be in my future—than an implant.

My surgery took around an hour and a half. I was in the clinic by 7:30am, put under general anesthesia, and awake around 11:30am. During the procedure, Dr. Rowe removed excess skin and sewed the gauze to my ribcage, reshaping the remaining skin and tissue to lift my breasts and nipples while reducing the size of my areolas. I was back to my hotel room in a surgical bra by noon. Recovery requires you to wear a surgical bra, day and night, for at least a month — eventually downgrading to a sports bra until around six weeks. A surgical bra is a wireless bralette that closes at the front (so you don’t have to stretch your arms back), and feels very lightweight but also extremely tight. The compression helps with the swelling but also keeps the breasts in their proper place as they heal. I was unable to sleep on my side for around 10 days, and there’s no lifting more than 10 pounds, or working out other than walking, for three weeks. Following that, scar tape or gel on the sutured areas (around the areola, down and under the breast) is an everyday essential for a year.

This dress was impossible for me to wear without a bra before, now they sit perfectly without any support.

The first several days require heavy reliance on another person. For the first 48 hours, my boyfriend lifted and lowered me into bed, dressed me, and brushed my hair and teeth because I couldn’t raise my arms. I was encouraged to walk the next day, and allowed to fly or drive if necessary on the second (I’d traveled to New York City for the surgery, and had booked my flight back home two days later). I had full mobility again by day three or four, but the discomfort should also not be underestimated—specifically with the internal bra. I felt a constant pang and tugging pain on my ribcage that affected even the most basic activities (like lifting groceries or shaving my legs) for the first several weeks.

For the first 24 hours, I was in so much pain that I cried all the way through my post-op appointment the next morning. In the first 24 hours, I was taking a low-dose prescription opiate by itself, which wasn’t enough pain medication, so Dr. Rowe recommended I take it in conjunction with Extra Strength Tylenol. (He compared Tylenol to the main meal, while Oxycodone and Tramadol were a kind of ‘chaser’—supplementing the OTC medication should I need something stronger.) Through my tears, I revealed my new, bruised breasts to Dr. Rowe. Upon inspecting his work, the surgeon concluded he was “very happy” with the results.

“You're trying to make their soul better,” he explains of cosmetic surgery. “While I'm not taking out their appendix, when a patient sees themselves as having a flaw–rightfully so or not–you're trying to correct it. And sometimes to them, it's life and death. Honestly, down deep, I'm a fixer. Seeing a problem and getting a solution, a good solution, it's gratifying.”

I didn’t look at my breasts for the first week—a mostly unconscious choice. For as long as I remember, I have avoided looking at my breasts entirely. Even before my weight loss changed their appearance significantly I always felt unsatisfied with them on a bad day, or ambivalent at best. Eight days after surgery, I unzipped my surgical bra and inspected the result for the first time. Dr. Rowe had reduced the size of my areolas, raised the nipples, and rounded my breasts into two symmetrical mounds. The anchor-shaped incision was sutured with almost invisible stitches. I was looking at boobs I had only seen on screen, or on my most genetically-blessed friends.

I turn away from the mirror. The change might seem slight to some, but to me, mastopexy had made a world of difference. “Tell me what you think,” I say to my boyfriend. “They’re perfect,” he responds. This time, I believed the beholder.

To read more about plastic surgery:

• Breast Lifts Are on the Way Up
• 13 People Get Real About Their Facelifts
• I’m 96 and I’ve Had 3 Facelifts — Here’s What I Learned

Now watch Brooke Shields' 10 Minute Beauty Routine:

Allure Daily Beauty Blast

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By Marci Robin

【4K 济南场（彩蛋歌曲）】许愿池的希腊少女 蔡依林 UGLY BEAUTY 演唱会

【4K】【蔡依林】超会扭！怎么可以首唱三连击！济南场赚大了！

【演唱会记录】蔡依林 Ugly Beauty Finale 济南站 2024.06.22（济南场太值了有木有！）

蔡依林Ugly Beauty济南站

【4K 温州场】恶之必要 - 甜秘密 蔡依林2024 UGLY BEAUTY 演唱会

「李健」「万物安生时」世界巡回演唱会 6.22 宁波奥体场 4K自录

【4K超清50P】如果云知道神级现场直拍-郁可唯北京演唱会

【6.22济南蔡依林】甜秘密+MrQ+倒带+迷幻+许愿池的希腊少女+ohlalala+我知道你很难过+妥协

2024.6.22 蔡依林 UGLY BEAUTY演唱会 济南 泉城耳立

【4K 温州场】大雨中热舞：海盗 - LOVE LOVE LOVE 蔡依林 2024 UGLY BEAUTY 演唱会

【4K饭拍 蔡依林UGLY BEAUTY】红衣女孩 - 美人计 - 美杜莎 - 特务J - 大丈夫 - Mr.Q - 爱无赦 上海站DAY1

［4K济南］Act 3 破碎的心完整版 蔡依林 Ugly Beauty演唱会

【Live】蔡依林Ugly Beauty Finale 太原站 （招牌动作+热冬4k）

［4K济南］Act 6 内在英雄Vip2正面直拍视角完整版 蔡依林 Ugly Beauty演唱会

历史不断重演，我好累｜【喻言】翻唱蔡依林的《妥协》

【4K饭拍 蔡依林UGLY BEAUTY】许愿池的希腊少女 - Because of You - 感觉你的存在 - You Gotta Know 上海DAY2

【直拍】蔡依林骑士精神 UB演唱会南昌Day1

【4K 济南场】布拉格广场 - LOVE LOVE LOVE 蔡依林 UGLY BEAUTY 演唱会

【4K 济南场】美杜莎 蔡依林 UGLY BEAUTY 演唱会

【周杰伦reaction】路人震惊！知道他有才，没想到这么有才

【蔡依林】唯舞独尊演唱会《许愿池的希腊少女》（2008/11/30美国圣荷赛）

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The ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ contest winner Wild Thang graces TODAY with his beauty

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try again.

That’s the message from the owner of Wild Thang, the newly crowned winner of the World’s Ugliest Dog contest, who finally won after five years of entering the competition.

The 8-year-old Pekingese didn’t place in his first go-round in the contest, and then followed it up with a trio of second-place finishes, before claiming this year's title on June 21 in Petaluma, California.

“He got second three years in a row, first year nothing. So then three years in a row, he got second and we were like, ‘Let’s just go again because it’s so much fun. And if not, we’ll go back the next year,’” his owner, Ann Lewis told TODAY on June 24.

“Even ugly is beautiful,” she added.

Lewis also said Wild Thang, who loves ice cream, ice and people, is enjoying his newfound fame, enduring a ton of attention during his trip to New York City — including at the airport.

“We got bombarded. He was just loving it,” she said. “He was wagging his tail. He was happy. He was getting head shots with people.”

The dog was born and raised in Los Angeles and recently retired to North Bend, Oregon, according to his bio on Sonoma-Marin Fair’s website . Wild Thang contracted distemper as a puppy from a rescue foster.

"He survived, but not without permanent damage," his bio says. "His teeth did not grow in, causing his tongue to stay out and his right front leg paddles 24/7."

Apart from the physical issues, Wild Thang is "a healthy, happy Glugly (glamorous/ugly) guy," his bio reads.

He and Lewis took home a $5,000 check.

NBC News’ Gadi Schwartz helped judge the 2024 contest, along with Linda Witong Abrahm, Brian Sobel, Amy Gutierrez, Fiona Ma.

Last year, a hairless Chinese Crested pup named Scooter took home the title. Scooter was born with deformed back legs and turned into animal control for euthanasia by his breeder. He was rescued by the Saving Animals From Euthanasia (SAFE) rescue group, which his owner is a member of, and now uses a cart to help him walk.

The contest has been going on for nearly 50 years, according to the website of Sonoma-Marin Fair, where the event takes place. The annual competition focuses on celebrating the uniqueness of all dogs and the benefits of adopting.

“The annual World’s Ugliest Dog Contest is not about making fun of ‘ugly’ dogs,” the website reads. “But having fun with some wonderful characters and showing the world that these dogs are really beautiful!"

Ella is an editorial intern at TODAY.com and was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.

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Coordinates of elektrostal in degrees and decimal minutes, utm coordinates of elektrostal, geographic coordinate systems.

WGS 84 coordinate reference system is the latest revision of the World Geodetic System, which is used in mapping and navigation, including GPS satellite navigation system (the Global Positioning System).

Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

Elevation above sea level is a measure of a geographic location’s height. We are using the global digital elevation model GTOPO30 .

Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia

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A Tenacious and Wild Pekingese Is the Ugliest Dog, After Five Tries

Meet Wild Thang, an 8-year-old Pekingese from Oregon who had sought the title of “World’s Ugliest” for years. Now, it’s finally his.

By Aimee Ortiz

Maybe it’s the way his lolling pink tongue juts out, or how his glittering wide eyes bejewel a tiny head under a mop of long, frizzy, brown-and-white fur, but there’s just something about Wild Thang — and a panel of judges agreed.

The 8-year-old Pekingese from Oregon was crowned the World’s Ugliest Dog on Friday, confirming that when the looks are, well, lacking, there’s something to be said for persistence. It was his fifth try for the top prize at the competition.

“His victory is a testament to his undeniable charm and resilience,” said a statement released by the competition following Wild Thang’s big win.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wild Thang’s life got off to a difficult start, according to his biography (yes, he has one). As a puppy, he contracted distemper, an infectious disease caused by a virus that attacks dogs’ respiratory, gastrointestinal and nervous systems. He barely survived, and his biography notes that Wild Thang was left permanently affected by the disease: “His teeth did not grow in, causing his tongue to stay out and his right front leg paddles 24/7.”

Nevertheless, Wild Thang is “a healthy, happy Glugly (glamorous/ugly) guy” who “loves people, other dogs and especially his toys.”

Like other beauty pageant winners, Wild Thang champions causes dear to him, according to his biography. He has helped raise money to get his fellow Pekingese doggies in Ukraine to safety — and has already saved seven of them from the war zone.

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We live in a partisan age, and our news habits can reinforce our own perspectives. Consider this an effort to broaden our collective outlook with essays beyond the range of our typical selections.

FROM THE LEFT

From “ The Most Dangerous Law in America ,” by Joseph Nunn in Democracy Journal at tinyurl.com/22w9vyt9 .

The context, from the author: The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States code, giving presidents unimaginable emergency power. No president has abused it. Yet.

The excerpt: Allowing the president unbounded authority to deploy troops domestically goes against core constitutional principles. It also invites abuse. In a host of scenarios — from political protests to the crisis at the Southern border — the Insurrection Act, in the wrong hands, could be used in ways that are more likely to cause emergencies than to resolve them. In such cases, the courts would likely deem themselves powerless to intervene, and Congress might be unable to muster the supermajority necessary to restrain the president.

From “ The First Three Months ,” by Anthony Fauci in The Atlantic at tinyurl.com/2f7pytvn .

The context, from the author: I took no pleasure in contradicting the president of the United States. I have always had a great deal of respect for the Office of the President, and to publicly disagree with the president was unnerving at best and painful at worst. But it needed to be done.

The excerpt: Admitting uncertainty is not fashionable in politics these days, but it is essential in my work. That’s the beauty of science. You make a factual observation. If the facts change, the scientific process self-corrects. You gather new information and data that sometimes require you to change your opinion. This is how we better care for people over time. But too few people understand the self-corrective nature of science. In our daily press conferences, I tried to act as if the American public were my patient, and the principles that guided me through my medical career applied.

From “ The Most Under-Covered Story of 2024: Trump and Right-Wing Extremism, ” by David Corn in Mother Jones at tinyurl.com/2xp9ku7w .

The context, from the author: For decades, there’s been an ugly swamp of bigotry, hatred, and intolerance on the right. Republicans have often played footsie with its denizens. ... But (former President Donald) Trump has enthusiastically leaped into this muck, bear-hugging and elevating extremists and miscreants. And he seems poised to welcome them into a Trump 2.0 administration. This ain’t a secret. But it practically might as well be, if the media and the Democrats don’t tell the story of this ongoing crusade loudly and often.

The excerpt: (One example) is Project 2025 , the operation organized by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks to develop a far-reaching agenda for a second Trump term that would grant him expanded powers to run an authoritarian-ish government in which he could order the prosecutions of his foes and critics and demand loyalty oaths from federal workers.

FROM THE RIGHT

From “ Yes, We Need ‘Camps’ for Illegal Immigrants ,” by Rrich Lowry in The National Review at tinyurl.com/3cameabf .

The context, from the author: Detention is a key part of enforcement.

The excerpt: The less inflammatory synonym for “camps” is enhanced ICE detention space, but that doesn’t have the same ring. The point of detention, by the way, isn’t to hold people, it is to remove them, as Trump noted the other day . Immigration hawks would be happy to skip the detention phase and simply turn around illegal immigrants at the border, or pick them up within the U.S. and send them back home immediately. If the ACLU and other open-borders organizations didn’t do so much to fight removal, there’d be less need for detention. The perverse effect of the use of the word “camps” is that it takes something that is normal and authorized — nay, mandated under federal law — and makes it sound illicit.

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From “ Nothing Is More American Than The Summer Road Trip ,” by Christopher Jacobs in The Federalist at tinyurl.com/yeysy8pj .

The context, from the author: I rediscovered the joys of the road trip through an unfortunate twist of fate. Nearly three years ago, my mother’s health deteriorated such that her continuing to drive became unwise and impractical. As such, I ended up inheriting her automobile.

The excerpt: Some months after the shock of this family health scare subsided, it dawned on me: I have a car in my back yard . More than a decade of living without an automobile in the nation’s capital had conditioned me to rely on public transit. And while maintaining a car was a financial luxury I could not afford right after I purchased my home, paying off my mortgage, not to mention the grant of a free and well-preserved automobile, meant I now had the means to use this car to explore. And explore I have. What started off as day-long sojourns to nearby locales turned into weekslong excursions to far-flung destinations. My car has taken me to major sporting events that represent pure Americana: the Indianapolis 500 , the Daytona 500 and the Kentucky Derby . In between the big spectacles, I’ve also found time to explore scenic byways and small towns, from Madison, Indiana, to Madison, Georgia.

From “ No, Biden’s Not Stuttering — but Could His Bizarre Speech Pattern Be Something Known As ‘Cluttering? ’” by Bob Hoge in RedState at tinyurl.com/5ykmz76m .

The context, from the author: I don’t relish in (President Joe) Biden’s speech impediment, his robotic gait, or his apparent confusion, but to tell us we’re not seeing it is the height of gaslighting. Their effort to convince you that the entire narrative is “fake” is not convincing, and few are buying it.

The excerpt: The bottom line is that the left can babble on all day about “cheap fakes,” but we’re seeing — and hearing — Biden’s decline right in front of our eyes and ears. Take any raw, unedited video or audio of Biden lately, and you don’t need to alter it to see that he is severely compromised.

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