"You don't cut off
your nose to spite
your face - that's
too easy - instead,
you should succumb
to ugliness rather
than win false
mastery over it.
Silence must be
attained by sheer
force of will, not
cheap mechanics. A
blowfish inflates
to frighten enemies
that it cannot
defeat in
one-on-one combat.
A body swells
death, as if
proud." - Mike
Kelley
We’re taught that
things are
beautiful and ugly,
and that in the
case of music, for
instance, through
European influence,
you’re taught not
to have parallel
fifths or parallel
octaves, not to
have certain
dissonances unless
you prepare them
properly, and so
forth and so on.
And we gradually in
modern music have
found that that’s
all nonsense, so
that the situation
actually of a
modern composer was
not so much a
distinguishing
between beautiful
and ugly—because
almost anything has
been accepted as
beautiful in the
twentieth century
already—but to find
some, actually some
reason for
devoting one’s
life to music. Why
would one do that?
- John Cage
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-
history-of-ugliness-shows-
that-there-is-no-such-thing
In the 19th
century, a hirsute
aboriginal woman
from Mexico named
Julia Pastrana was
billed on the
freak-show circuit
as ‘The Ugliest
Woman in the
World’. Brought to
Europe, she
performed according
to Victorian norms:
singing and
dancing, speaking
in foreign
languages,
undergoing public
‘Ugly’ is usually
meant to slander,
but in recent
decades, aesthetic
categories have
been treated with
growing suspicion.
‘We cannot see
beauty as
innocent,’ writes
the philosopher
Kathleen Marie
Higgins, when ‘the
sublime splendor of
the mushroom cloud
accompanies moral
evil.’ Debates gain
traction as the
world changes, as
‘beautiful’ and
‘ugly’ meanings
slip and slide. In
2007, a video went
viral tagged as
‘The World’s
Ugliest Woman’.
Rather than
Pastrana, it showed
Lizzie Velásquez,
then 17, born in
Texas blind in one
eye with a rare
disorder that
prevents her from
gaining weight.
Public comments
called her a
‘monster’, even
saying ‘just kill
yourself’. The
experience led
Velásquez to make a
documentary against
cyberbullying,
released in 2015
and raising the
question of whether
‘ugly’ might be
better applied to
the accusers.
At opposite
extremes,
‘ugliness’ has
become not only an
endpoint dismissal
but also a rallying
cry. In different
times and places,
any one of us might
have been
considered ugly:
from the red-haired
to the blue-eyed,
left-handed to
hook-nosed,
humpbacked to
blighted. It’s easy
to turn any
external feature
into a sign for
ugliness (and much
more difficult to
go the other way),
or to reduce the
story of ugliness
to a string of case
studies, without
considering its
larger legacy.
In ancient Greece,
synonyms of
ugliness connoted
evil, disgrace and
handicap.
Exceptions could
arise (the ugly but
wise philosopher
Socrates; the
deformed
fable-telling slave
Aesop), but
external features
tended to be seen
as a reflection of
internal worth or a
congenital omen.
The ancient
pseudo-science of
physiognomy read
moral goodness and
evil
proportionately to
beautiful and ugly
features. Medieval
fairy tales
transformed
beauties and
beasts, but
negative
connotations
carried across
centuries. Monsters
arose in the
margins of
misunderstanding as
colonial empires
expanded. European
explorers, for
instance,
interpreted ‘ugly’
sculptures of
Indian gods as
apocalyptic omens,
read through
Christian
narratives for
which they were
never intended.
The 18th and 19th
centuries continued
to test the
wavering line
between beauty and
ugliness.
Caricatures
exaggerated
features at a time
when ‘ugliness’ and
‘deformity’ were
defined almost
interchangeably.
The British
Parliamentarian
William Hay, who
was hunchbacked,
tried to
disentangle
‘deformity’ from
its negative
partner and argued
that his deformed
body did not mirror
an ugly soul. Even
as traditional
meanings were
challenged, freak
shows hurled
ugliness to new
heights, alongside
museums of anatomy
and world fairs
that exhibited
human specimens and
ethnic displays.
The First World War
blew up inherited
notions of
ugliness. As
warfare achieved
new levels of
mechanisation,
once-beautiful
young men were
rendered ugly by
the ravages of
grenades, mustard
gas and tanks. Some
soldiers such as les
Gueules cassées
(or ‘broken faces’)
banded together for
‘our horrible face’
to become ‘a moral
educator’ that
‘returned us our
dignity’. While
most died or
retreated from
view, the visual
shock became
repackaged as
artists and
advertisers tried
to re-piece a new
world order. By the
1930s, Nazi Germany
supported a
nationalised
aesthetic to censor
the ugly in terms
of ‘degenerate’,
correlating
artworks and
cultural groups
alike as targets of
persecution and
extermination.
During times of
conflict, any
threat or enemy can
be uglified and
thus generalised.
An individual can
get lumped into an
‘ugly’ group by an
arbitrary feature –
a yellow armband,
or a black
headscarf –
depending on the
eye of the
beholder. While
‘ugly’ can be
latched on to
virtually anything,
the word’s slippery
legacy brands
bodies, and can
suggest more about
the observer than
the observed. As
Frank Zappa sang,
the ‘ugliest part
of your body’ is
not your nose or
your toes but ‘your
mind’.
In the late 1930s,
Kenneth and Mamie
Clark travelled the
American South to
study the
psychological
effects of racial
discrimination and
segregation, asking
children to choose
between white and
black dolls. The
white doll was
overwhelmingly
characterised as
‘pretty’, the black
doll as ‘ugly’,
with accompanying
qualities of ‘good’
and ‘bad’, ‘clean’
and ‘dirty’.
Following a similar
theme in her novel
The Bluest Eye
(1970), Toni
Morrison wrote of
the effect of
racism on the
Breedlove family:
It was as though
some mysterious
all-knowing master
had given each one
a cloak of ugliness
to wear… The master
had said, ‘You are
ugly people.’ They
had looked about
themselves and saw
nothing to
contradict that
statement; saw, in
fact, support for
it leaning at them
from every
billboard, every
movie, every
glance.
Art holds up a
mirror to shifting
attitudes. Initial
tags of ‘ugly’
sometimes get
forgotten as
once-derided
subjects become
valued.
Impressionism of
the 19th century –
now featured in
blockbuster
exhibits – was
initially compared
to mushy food and
rotting flesh. When
Henri Matisse’s
works showed in the
US at the Armory
Show of 1913,
critics lambasted
his art as ‘ugly’,
while art students
in Chicago burned
an effigy of his Blue Nude
in front of the Art
Institute. The same
institution mounted
a major
retrospective of
his work a century
later. Jazz and
rock’n’roll were
once considered
‘ugly’ music,
threatening to
corrupt entire
generations.
In the face of
‘ugly’ slurs, some
artists embraced
the word. The
painter Paul
Gauguin called
ugliness ‘the
touchstone of our
modern art’. The
poet and translator
Ezra Pound
encouraged a ‘cult
of ugliness’. The
composer Charles H
H Parry praised
ugliness in music,
without which
‘there would not be
any progress in
either social or
artistic things’.
The critic Clement
Greenberg lauded
Jackson Pollock’s
abstract
expressionism as
‘not afraid to look
ugly – all
profoundly original
art looks ugly at first’.
The word’s
appropriation has
helped to diffuse
its negative
charge. The
17th-century
Chinese painter
Shitao seemed to
anticipate
Pollock’s energetic
brushstrokes when
he titled his
painting
Ten Thousand Ugly
Inkblots
. An earlier
tradition of
medieval Arabic
poetry worked to
positively reframe
human conditions
related to disease
and disability by
‘uglifying beauty
and beautifying
ugliness’. The
French term
jolie laide
, or ‘beautiful
ugly’, harks back
to the 18th-century
when ‘ugly clubs’
emerged in Britain
and the US as
voluntary fraternal
organisations,
whose facetious
members made light
of their own motley
crew of noses,
chins and squints.
Many clubs were
demeaning and
short-lived, but
others – like
Italy’s
still-existing
festa dei brutti
, or Festival of
the Ugly – survived
and try to confront
discriminations
based on
appearance.
Even as politics
and social media
wield ‘ugly’ spars,
popular
entertainment has
embraced ugliness.
The television show Ugly Betty
(2006-10) ran a
campaign to ‘Be
Ugly’, and
Shrek the Musical
bore the tagline
‘Bringing Ugly
Back!’ The popular
children’s toys
Uglydolls carry the
motto: ‘Ugly is the
new beautiful!’
While some
entertainment
fetishises
ugliness, books
such as Robert
Hoge’s memoir Ugly
(2013) and Scott
Westerfeld’s young
adult sci-fi novel Uglies
(2005) encourage
people to look
beyond physical
appearance. One
anti-cyberbullying
organisation has
recast UGLY as an
acronym: ‘Unique,
Gifted, Loveable,
You’. Once socially
isolating, ‘ugly’
has been
increasingly turned
against itself to
challenge inherited
meanings and even
confront
injustices.
When we call
something ugly, we
say something about
ourselves – and
what we fear or
dread. The
19th-century
freak-show handlers
and viewers who
called Pastrana
‘ugly’ cast
themselves in the
shadow of the
sideshow. Her
remains were
repatriated to
Mexico in 2012 when
the Norwegian
National Committee
for Research Ethics
on Human Remains
reversed
the label by
calling those
handlers and
viewers
‘grotesque’. The
question remains:
how do we perceive
and react to
similar situations
in our midst? How
do we set the stage
for the future?
Victor Hugo offered
an embracing view
of ugliness when he
wrote that ‘the
beautiful’ is
‘merely form
considered in its
simplest aspect’,
while ‘the ugly’ is
‘a detail of a
great whole which
eludes us, and
which is in
harmony, not with
man but with all
creation’. As the
binary stars of
ugliness and beauty
keep orbiting each
other in our
expanding universe,
we might well
remember all the
other stars
swinging around
them as potential
new constellations.