Art is not obligated to be beautiful. It is not obligated to be technically good or even skillful. It is not obligated to use scientifically accurate perspective or anatomical proportion. And, maybe most of all, art is not obligated to tell a good story. As an art history student, I have found this to be a particularly difficult thing for me to convince my friends and family of, having been met with questions like “Why is this painting displayed in a museum? I could’ve painted that.” Or an even worse offense, insisting that the sale of a $181 million Jackson Pollock is nothing more than a money laundering scheme.

Beauty, Realism, and the Legacy of Sameness

What makes good art good? 

Most people will look at an artwork and ask themselves the question: “Do I like this?” For some, a painting with beautiful subject matter (flowers, a seascape, a sunset) will elicit an immediate and instinctual “yes!”. Others might look for narrative or symbolic qualities that emotionally resonate with them personally. Think religious figures, a scene from Greek mythology, a political reference. But at this point, whether someone likes a painting depends entirely on the subject matter itself or the meaning it conveys rather than any of the painting’s inherent qualities – qualities like color, texture, form, etc. 

Then there are the realists. Those who determine artwork’s quality solely based on its ability to mimic real life. The closer in proximity a piece is to photographic realism, the more accomplished they believe the artist to be. Or the traditionalists, who judge a painting by how closely it adheres to the conventions of the Old Masters. These aesthetic obligations and the necessity of an artwork to be beautiful or meaningful or realistic or traditional, have produced literal centuries worth of the same boring but beautiful portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. And yet, artists still receive pressure from art haters and the artfully unaware alike to continue the legacy of sameness today. 

I think of the 20th century New York art critic, Clement Greenberg, and his philosophy on visual art. As an advocate of abstract expressionism, Greenberg insisted that the merit of an art form should only be judged by the qualities that are inherent to its form. Storytelling, for example, is 

inherent to books, to plays, and, now, to film. Photographic realism is inherent, of course, to photography. A painting is an ineffective storyteller and an even more ineffective photographer, so why use the medium to do what other forms can do better? And once a painting is stripped of these redundancies, stripped of narrative, stripped of symbolic depiction or representation, you are simply left with paint. And the question becomes whether a painter can lay down paint with effective use of color, texture, value, etc.

Aesthetic Authoritarianism 

Since the withdrawal of Amy Sherald’s portraits from the Smithsonian, I’ve been thinking about the issue of art censorship, particularly throughout authoritarian administrations. Germany’s 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, for example, publicly displayed art deemed ugly and “degenerate” to ridicule unconventional artists. The government labeled these works as evidence of moral decay, using the humiliating exhibition as an avenue to persecute modern, and mostly Jewish, artists. Likewise, the Soviet Union famously enforced realism in its state-mandated art schools. 

But even today, I see individuals, often outsiders to the arts community, imposing the same moral judgements. Instagram user, thewaronbeauty, for example, an influencer with a following of 180 thousand and counting, argues that contemporary art is morally degrading. Demonic, even. In one video, she scrutinizes Rothko’s chapel in Houston. And as you probably have already guessed – because it’s not beautiful. 

And what bothers me most about this kind of criticism is not that any one individual dislikes any given modern or contemporary artwork. Lots of people think Rothko’s work is ugly or boring or untalented. But, waronbeauty not only takes issue with Rothko, but also with the millions of Rothko devotees, heavily insinuating them to be mindless, herd-mentality drones. People like waronbeauty not only want to regulate artwork and impose their own standards of “goodness” or “beauty”, but they also want to control what kind of work is actually liked or disliked by the public.

Artwork that dares to be ugly, that dares to be unskilled, unconventional, or radically new, gives the middle finger to aesthetic authoritarianism. It refuses to conform, breaking away from centuries of sameness. Sameness preserved in the name of tradition, comfort, and narrow definitions of beauty. 

So, to the artists out there: keep making ugly art. Keep making art that breaks traditional convention. If you’re lucky, you might just make something brand new.

What do you think about the artistic rebellion against expected fake aesthetic styles? Let us know in the comments!