Aesthetic investigations of ugliness have increased in popularity in the last decade, but existing treatments of ugliness either fail to provide a satisfying explanation for ugliness' unique presence and role, or merely provide a compendium of ugly instances. This thesis provides a non-equivocating explanation of ugliness which accounts for its phenomenological variety while retaining the roles of both object and subject, constituting a novel treatment in the field of aesthetics. An account of the concept's popular association as a beauty's negation is reassessed, along with investigation of the proliferation of species, features, and problems associated with ugliness in aesthetic writings. In addition to surveying classic and contemporary notions of ugliness in western aesthetics, this thesis provides a novel survey of ugliness in East Asian aesthetics, with a focus on ugliness in Chinese aesthetics. The project encompasses not only artistic instances of ugliness, but also natural phenomenon as well. The exploration and explanation of the nature of ugliness as a negative aesthetic value is accomplished by locating the conceptual core of ugly experience in a framework of aspectual judgment.

Magister Artium - MA / Bab’aba - Ugly Short Stories is a collection of vignettes whose function is to colour and collage three portraits of Black women characters; namely, a rural woman (Nozikhali), a township teenager (Zola), and a child/baby (Loli). Each of these stories serve as details in each other’s portraits whilst remaining stories on their own. My intention with this collection was to restore some form of abstract equality and right to mystery by functioning within a lexicon of opacity. In the scholarship of decoloniality this is my argument for the legitimacy of vernacular/customised definitions for problems that preoccupy communities/individuals rather than having to always pin ourselves to already existing theory in order to be legible. In the scholarship of opacity, this is a contribution to the argument against the necessity for legibility/transparency (in the first place) in exchange for dignity. I chose ugliness as my thematic district of departure because of its connoted potential to provide richer explorations into notions of marginality and an emancipatory praxis that cannot afford to have in its makeup the potential to seek to eliminate. And though such a liberatory ambition is hard to fantasize about against the backdrop of popular chauvinism in the contemporary landscape of - particularly - South Africa, and the visceral effects thereof and the swift justice needed to attend thereto, I do think that there is merit in hallucinating some sort of doctrine of humanity that ends in dignity for all.

This thesis investigates, through a body of interdisciplinary artwork, the representation of the grotesque body. It examines how it might be possible to manipulate the iconography of attraction and repulsion in contemporary art with the aim of confusing the binary opposition of what signifies pleasure and disgust. Each of the three artworks function to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with representations that are simultaneously appealing and revolting. Using a number of modes and techniques to disrupt the dyad, including audience interaction and the use of seductive visual forms, the work focuses on my body as a site for the development of new knowledge about the representation of the non-preferred body. By bringing together otherwise unrelated discourses such as horror and formalist abstract painting, the artwork in this study attempts to call into doubt received wisdom about the nature of beauty and ugliness. There are a lexicon of different artistic mediums explored in this project including performance, installation, video and photography. The engagement with these disciplines represents an attempt to speculate on how we know and experience the body in an increasingly mediatised world. This research is also a key means of highlighting how our understanding of the body is informed by the differing effects of timebased, photographic and performative media. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, this project seeks to activate in the viewer/participant, a critical self-reflexivity. I ask how it is possible to know and experience corporeality in a virtual world of digitally manipulated bodies.

The emergence of modern art, and subsequently contemporary art, has brought with it a deep-rooted deliberation of the definition of beauty and its role in the realm of art. Unlike many representational artworks, contemporary art less often contains a beauty that is readily available on the surface of an artwork- an easy beauty. Instead, it often possesses a beauty that requires substantial reasoning and understanding- a difficult beauty. Just as the definition of beauty has and will continue to be culturally and historically changing, so must our methodological and pedagogical practices in regards to beauty and Aesthetics. As Art Educators, I feel it is our responsibility to help students process artworks that may contain these complexities (such as difficult beauty), in search of meaning and understanding. Through understanding is derived fluency in processing the artwork, which, in turn, leads to appreciation, and pleasure. The study conducted in this thesis investigated the relationship between beauty, ugliness, and meaning and explored the reasons behind judgments of beauty. It can be concluded, through the results, that beauty and meaning are closely related, and that meaning can have both positive and negative affects on judgments of beauty. Judgments of beauty are both cognitive and affective and appear to have social and cultural foundations, as well as a relationship to personal experience and meaning. Ultimately, strong personal meaning and experience, both positive and negative, outweighed physical, social, and cultural judgments of beauty. Meaning and experience greatly affect judgments of beauty. As educators, we can take the information gleaned from this study to enhance the ability of students to process artworks which contain complexities and may require understanding. As students become more able to recognize and process beauty in its many forms, the fluency in which they process such artworks will increase, thus promoting more positive aesthetic experiences. The children's book, Terrible the Beautiful Bear, contained in Chapter Six of this thesis, is an example of how to teach this concept to young children. Helping students become aware that beauty exists in curious and difficult places, and prompting them to search for meaning, gives students a greater capacity to take part in its pleasure.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to introduce the notion of ugliness as an aesthetic category, concerning the question of its position in the aesthetic experience, based in particular on the conception of difficult beauty by Bernard Bosanquet. The first part of the thesis discusses the possibility of aesthetic experiencing of unpleasantness and so specifies ugliness as inherently aesthetic category, in comparison to the unaesthetic response of disgust. The second part of the thesis deals with the question of position of ugliness and the feeling of unpleasantness if ugliness is an adequate part of the aesthetic experience which is regarded as excellent and contributing. The solution offered by Bosanquet in his conception of difficult beauty however isn't fully sufficient and therefore the last chapter introduces the problem of ugliness from a different viewpoint which emphasizes the negativity and disturbance of ugliness, impossible to dissolve. The key feature of ugliness is the ambivalent link amongst the repulsion and the attraction in aesthetic experiencing. The attribution of a meaning in the whole of the aesthetic experience, i.e. the possibility of attaining new insight thanks to ugliness, may however lead to a tendency to the reconciliation of ugliness. The original unpleasantness and...

In Ancient Egypt, the concept of beauty is well-known and discussed by modern scholars. This concept is known from the old Egyptian language as ‘nfr’. In contrast to this, the term and concept of ancient Egyptian ugliness is neither understood nor analyzed. Since the Egyptians indeed had a perception of societal beauty, then logically, they would have had a perception of ugliness as well. This study aims to uncover the truth about the ugly and grotesque in ancient Egypt, questioning how this would have been expressed and manifested in Egyptian society. The research in this study is conducted through the hermeneutic method of comparison and analyzation, which of mostly is pictorial, however includes some textual evidence as well.

<p>Against the dominant contemporary options of usefulness and disinterestedness, this dissertation attempts to display that beauty is better--more fully, richly, generatively--described with the categories of fittingness and gratuity. By working through texts by Gregory of Nyssa, this dissertation fills out what fittingness and gratuity entail--what, that is, they <italic>do</italic> for beauty-seekers and beauty-talkers. After the historical set-up of the first chapter, chapter 2 considers fittingness and gratuity through Gregory's doctrine of God because Beauty, for Gregory, is a name for God. That God is radically transcendent transforms (radicalizes) fittingness and gratuity away from a strictly Platonic vision of how they might function. Chapter 3 extends such radicalization by considering beauty in light of Christology and particularly in light of the Christological claims to invisibility, poverty, and suffering. In a time when beauty is wending its way back from an academic exile enforced by its associations with the `bourgeois,' such considerations re-present beauty as deeply intertwined with ugliness and horror. Chapter 4 asks how it is a person might perceive such beauty, which calls for pneumatological and anthropological reflections on Gregory's doctrine of the spiritual senses. The person who sees beauty rightly, for Gregory, is the person who is wounded by love.</p> / Dissertation

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Le présent travail étudie la manière dont la théorie artistique et la peinture italiennes de l' « automne de la Renaissance », chacune avec ses modalités propres, ont pensé le laid et l'ont progressivement rapproché du beau. La première partie est ainsi consacrée à la traditionnelle conception de la laideur comme simple contraire de la beauté, c'est-à-dire comme dysharmonie formelle. La seconde partie porte sur le passage de cette antithèse conceptuelle entre le beau et laid à leur articulation paradoxale, où la laideur se voit conférer des qualités généralement attribuées à la beauté. Plusieurs "belles laideurs" sont alors envisagées : celle des peintures sacrées « cruelles et horribles » (Gabriele Paleotti), qui tirent leur beauté de leur conformité aux Écritures, donc de leur vérité ; celle des figures dites "siléniques", dont les dehors repoussants laissent transparaître une bonté d'âme ; celle des "caprices" artistiques qui, sous une apparente difformité, recèlent une signification manifestant l‟ingéniosité de leur créateur ; ou encore celle relevant du paradoxe aristotélicien de la représentation, selon lequel des laideurs correctement imitées suscitent du plaisir chez l'observateur. Dans le cadre de l'esthétique baroque, la "belle laideur" devient un oxymore, où l‟horreur du contenu de la mimésis est consciemment exploitée afin de souligner, par contraste, le pouvoir transfigurateur de l'artiste. La théorisation de la caricature au cours du XVIIe siècle, évoquée en conclusion, viendra suggérer une coïncidence de la beauté et de la laideur qui, du moins dans leurs formes idéales, semblent en réalité constituer les deux faces d'une même médaille. / This research analyses the way Italian paintings and artistic theory from the late Renaissance conceptualised ugliness, and gradually drew it closer to beauty. The first part of this dissertation focuses on the traditional notion of ugliness as the mere opposite of beauty, in other words, ugliness as an expression of formal disharmony. The second part deals with the evolution from this conceptual antithesis to the paradoxical entwinement of these two notions, which led some authors to endow ugliness with qualities which had hitherto been applied to beauty. We will consider several forms of „beautiful ugliness‟: those of the “cruel and horrible” (Gabriele Paleotti) sacred paintings whose beauty resides in their faithful rendering of the Scriptures, or, in other words, in their truthfulness; those of the Silenus-like characters whose kindness pierces through revolting physical traits; those of the artistic capricci who, under their apparent deformity, hide the ingenuity of their creator; or those who take up the Aristotelian paradox, according to which the correct imitation of ugliness arouses a feeling of pleasure among the spectator. In the Baroque aesthetic, the „beautiful ugliness‟ is an oxymoronic creation in which the horrifying content of the mimesis is consciously used in order to highlight, by contrast, the transformative power of the artist. The conceptualisation of caricature in the 17th century, which we will mention at the end of this work, suggests that beauty and ugliness, at least in their ideal forms, are in fact the two sides of a same coin.

La thèse analyse les conceptions pré-modernes du laid en confrontant les traités philosophiques, rhétoriques, poétiques et artistiques italiens et français de la Renaissance à la première moitié du dix-septième siècle. En tant que difformité physique, le laid est considéré comme une transgression des normes du corps : il met en question la conception de la mimésis comme imitation idéalisante et permet de repenser la nature de la représentation. Le laid est en outre conçu comme le signe du vice : l’étude cherche à reconstituer le paradigme physiognomonique qui sous-tend cette interprétation traditionnelle du corps et s’interroge sur ses limites en examinant le paradoxe de la laideur de Socrate. Les interprétations morales de la difformité mettent en jeu différentes fonctions sémiotiques de la représentation. Dans la topique héritée de la scolastique, la mimésis du laid vise à stigmatiser les défauts moraux, comme le montrent les allégories des vices et les satires ; de son côté, la difformité paradoxale donne lieu à une herméneutique du texte et de l’image. Enfin, le laid tient à son effet sur le destinataire. Si le laid est traditionnellement appréhendé comme un objet repoussant, sa représentation vise à susciter l’effet inverse, selon les poétiques et les traités d’art inspirés d’Aristote. L’analyse de ce plaisir paradoxal met en lumière les qualités cognitives et esthétiques de la mimésis. Au seuil de la modernité, la question du laid est à la croisée des problématiques morales héritées de l’Antiquité, et des réflexions esthétiques qui se développeront pleinement du dix-huitième siècle à nos jours, notamment dans les théories de la fiction. / Through cross-analysis of French and Italian philosophical, rhetorical, poetic, and artistic treatises from the Renaissance to the first half of the seventeenth century, this study seeks to understand what the early modern period conceived of the ugly. In terms of physical deformity, the ugly is considered as a transgression of the norms of the body: it questions the concept of mimesis as an idealised imitation and allows a reconsideration of the nature of representation. Furthermore, the ugly is seen as the sign of vice: this study looks to reconstruct the physiognomical paradigm which underlies this traditional interpretation of the body and to question its limits through examining Socrates’ paradoxical ugliness. Moral interpretations of deformity bring different semiotic functions of representation into play. In the topic inherited from scholasticism, mimesis of the ugly aims to stigmatise moral defects, as they are represented in allegories about vice and satire. Paradoxical deformity, for its part, gives rise to hermeneutics of text and image. Finally, the ugly is concerned with its effect on its recipient. If the ugly is traditionally understood as a repellent object, its representation aims to arouse the inverse effect, according to the poetics and treatises on art inspired by Aristotle. Analysis of this paradoxical pleasure highlights the aesthetic and cognitive qualities of mimesis. At the brink of modernity, the question of the ugly is at the crossroads of moral issues that stem from the Antiquity, and of aesthetic reflections which develop more fully from the eighteenth century to the present day, notably in theories on fiction.