[7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.]
Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction.[64]It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.
Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly.
In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself—a man who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye, is also famous for having flung down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris— once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.
At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy. Realism is essentially democratic."[65]
As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said that he had a predilection for the ugly.[66]
Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art, as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.
But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type.[67]It is the sign that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto called ugly according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race), are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing. In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, and far-reaching vision in it—it is the profoundest of all hatreds. On account of it art is profound."[68]
The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.