Ugliness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ugliness is possessed by physical things that are unappealing to the senses, especially visually. It often indicates that something provokes revulsion or horror. The term is commonly used in reference to human appearance. The opposite of ugliness is beauty.
Some argue that ugliness is a matter of subjective aesthetics, claiming that one person may perceive to be beautiful something that another may find ugly (as referenced in the popular phrase Beauty is in the eye of the beholder). However the predominant view in the scientific fields is that human ugliness is part of sexual selection and an indicator of poor genetic or physical health.
Although usually thought of in terms of a lack of physical beauty, the property of ugliness, like beauty, may also be ascribed to other phenomena, such as music, literature, human behavior, and so on.
As a 19th and 20th century aesthetic category, see the cult of ugliness.
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Adjective
- very unattractive, repulsive.
- displeasing to the eye, or ear, or sensibilities; unsightly.
- not aesthetically pleasing.
Related terms
aesthetics - bad - dirty - disgusting - freaks - grotesque - incongruity - monster - offensive - obscene - repulsive - sordid
Synonyms
The Ugly Duchess (1525-30) - Quentin Matsys
Contemporary photographers fascinated with ugliness
The sublime
The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Burke's concept of the sublime was a stark contrast to the classical notion of aesthetic quality in Plato's Philebus, Ion, and Symposium, and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality.
The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (2005) - Patrizia Bettella
The ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Italian poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. Mostly used between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries – from the invectives of Rustico Filippi, Franco Sacchetti, and Burchiello, to the paradoxical praises of Francesco Berni, Niccolò Campani and Pietro Aretino, and further to the conceited encomia of Giambattista Marino and Marinisti – the portrayal of female unattractiveness was, argues Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman, one way of figuring woman as ‘other.’
Bettella shows how medieval female ugliness included transgressive types ranging from the lustful old hag, to the slanderer, the wild woman, the heretic/witch, and the prostitute, whereas Early Modern unattractiveness targeted peasants, mountain dwellers, and black slaves: marginal women whose bodies and manners subvert aesthetic precepts of culturally normative beauty and propriety. Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.
Films related to "ugliness"
- The Beauty and the Beast (1947)
- Freaks (1932)
- The Elephant Man (1980)
- Shrek (2001) - Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
Namesakes
Bibliography
- On Ugliness (2007) - Umberto Eco
