AAH Annual Conference 2011
31 March – 2 April, University of Warwick

Since William Hogarth introduced his 1753 Analysis of Beauty with principles “by which we are directed to call the forms of some bodies beautiful, others ugly,” modern art and aesthetics have frequently rethought this duality or denied it altogether. A skeptical tradition, founded perhaps by David Hume and recently revived by Pierre Bourdieu, sees in beauty and ugliness the exercise of social habit and acts of group membership; an opposed tradition, which might include Hogarth along with Umberto Eco today, finds in beauty and ugliness a fundamental vocabulary for thinking and feeling about the world and society, in spite of the relativity of taste. It seems to us that the nerve center of this dispute lies in the negative term of the pair, ugliness. The anxious responses elicited by the ugly provokes questions of the reality (social, political, moral) of aesthetic categories embedded in a rich historical body of analogies between ugliness and injustice (Theodor Adorno), unfreedom (Karl Rosenkranz), equality (Julia Kristeva), and low social status (Friedrich Nietzsche). If any common intellectual affinity exists between the realist and constructivist positions on ugliness, it is an abiding and still eminently timely interest in the moral and political implications of aesthetics. We invite scholarly presentations from various theoretical and historical perspectives, addressing ugliness and its discourse in case studies of aesthetic objects, strategies, and texts.

Session Convenors: Andrei Pop, apop@post.harvard.edu, Mechtild Widrich, mwidrich@alum.mit.edu