Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

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“It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: “a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife.” As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses ‘ugliness’ as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show “Ugly Betty” to Umberto Eco’s art history tome On Ugliness, which I’ve recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton’s Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:



In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I’ve pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty’s is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It’s Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it’s more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.

Book Review: Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

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Death of Chatterton

Who was Chatterton? Thomas Chatterton, while a teenager in the 1760s, sold his poetry as that of a medieval monk. Despite his precocious talent, he was unable to make his way in London. He chose to die by arsenic rather than starvation in 1770, at the age of 18. Posthumously, his forgery was discovered. Chatterton became celebrated as a key Romantic figure, which is why in 1856 George Meredith posed as the young poet for the famous Death of Chatterton done by Henry Wallis, immediately before Mrs. Meredith left him for Wallis. These things are true.

Peter Ackroyd’s contemporary plot takes these stories in hand, and tells them in his own way, as they intertwine with the tale of idealistic poet Charles Wychwood, who ignores his sickness to his wife and young son in order to follow a “wild goose chase,” as his wife puts it. Charles believes that a painting he had found of a middle-aged man was of a middle-aged Chatterton, meaning that Chatterton had faked his own death and written most of the English canon of the mid-1700s. Soon he has his acquaintances believing it. With Chatterton as a lodestone for the plot and for Charles, the characters each digress into this diaspora of quirks and questions.

To anyone who delights in whim and eccentricity, these characters are a hoot, from the energy of the slightly mad, narcisstic bulldozer Harriet Scrope to the elderly bickering queers who originally owned the painting. Similarly, the gallery owners with their backhanded insults make for an enjoyable madness, and the uncanny air of the antique shop extends to its owners. The oddball characters are classically British.

To increase the madness, the theme of reality and fakeness comes up so often and in so many contexts it is dizzying. The incidents of the plot suggest that either nothing or everything is real. In a way, we are denied an answer when the portrait bubbles up without revealing its secrets, as if possessed qualities akin to that of Dorian Grey. Ackroyd does suggest that through art we continue to live beyond death. Reality, as we experience it in Chatterton, seems bound together by a series of coincidences that links people between time and place. Thus, the deaths of Chatterton and Charles run parallel, and the reader finds the two together as the books closes.

Ackroyd is such an accomplished, humorous post-Modern writer who displays each of his characters with fondness that the reader ends up sharing. Like screwball comedies that transcends their genre, Ackroyd’s intellect is an octopus that stretches the tentacles of a story to each corner to display the connectedness he finds in life. Ackroyd seems to be under read in America. Until I picked up this old book again, I had almost forgotten one of my favorite contemporary authors. His work includes The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and, as you can imagine, I’ll read that soon.

ARTnews Bores Me

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From the November issue of the venerable ARTnews comes a revelation: “Street art—including stickers, posters, murals, graffiti, and even 3-D sculptures—is making its way into mainstream galleries and museums.” No shit, Sherlock. Is the air under your rock stifling you?

This is why I don’t really read ARTnews: it bores me. You?

It bores me because the content is exactly what I could have surmised myself. In this leading article “Two way street,” writer Carolina Miranda addresses street art’s entry into mainstream channels of consumption. After Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, London’s Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York have each ‘covered’ the genre– then ARTnews document it. Musuem have been paying attention, as have galleries and collectors. ARTnews is even falling behind the mainstream. Tsk tsk….

ARTnews tags itself as “The oldest, most-widely read fine arts magazine in the world.” Congratulations! Now step up your act before you become “The oldest, most-atavistic art history magazine in the world.”
More discussion of the effects of street art going mainstream would have been welcome. Their work has gone from the street to the inner sanctums, and artists no longer face the same resistance and challenges to spreading or selling their work. It’s been made legitimate. This safe, generic article doesn’t touch on these issues, but it does continue to erode the charm of illictness street art once possesed. To its (small) credit, it does mention Shepard Fairey, of Andre the Giant fame, Lazarides, whose show on Bowery I loved a few weeks ago, and also to my hometown. On the other hand, they work with and talk to all the right people, and there’s something to be said for that.