This Dictionary Image shows the US spelling for the word. Get it? United States? Not effete, not intellectual. United States.
So, if I say that someone's art looks UGLY to me, you won't criticize

I am...but the basics I'm familiar with and that I abide by predate the post-modernist idea that there are no standards by which to judge beauty.

I do believe there are a finite number of "gatekeepers" of what is seen on the network and major cable channels, and they're interested in financial return. Radio has FEWER "gatekeepers" and damn few radio stations have the ability to choose the music that personally like to play for the people listening.

This certainly doesn't limit the people from choosing their own entertainment.

But for the mass media, the mass market, there ARE "gatekeepers". Many times people do not realize why LINKIN PARK or some other group gets airplay.

Unless you have known a band that couldn't get a live gig in a town to save their lives.

Maybe you DO know. I don't care.

Point is, the people that produce such things as magazines and TV shows and Radio end up reporting to the real "gatekeepers" and fewer and fewer decisions are made on any sense of "beauty" or "ugly". This frustrates people who do have an outdated version of what is beauty and what is ugly.

Hell, the funniest thing I saw last year was a fight between two art directors argueing over which font to use on a particular project. Both were willing to go to the mat, and it nearly came to blows.

Because of beauty? Financial beauty, most likely. "Which one would the audience most like to see?" To choose one implies the other was "ugly". Both widely used fonts, too!

In recent years, making money showing the ugly side of life has been a trend. Ugly also applies to subject matter as well. I know people who actively avoid some TV shows (not TV in general - that's a different argument) because the TV show would show "gross" things. Subjective rejection.(The edible portions of "Fear Factor" come to mind)

But there are those gatekeepers that cater to the common denominator. They do try to keep up on the latest trends, and even hire young people to figure out what the latest trend is, so they can copy and/or broadcast it, thus making money, even as their programming sets the trends they are following. Very cynical, eh?

Rap was not mainstream when it first came out. Rap was counter-culture in nature. But then, so were many musical styles.

Eventually, it's not art. It's business.

If enough people care about any art, it becomes a business.

Yep.
Very cynical.

Pat,
I don't pretend to be an expert on ancient Greek aesthetics, but if you are stating that some of the ancient Greeks believed (a) that objective standards of beauty did exist, and (b) that the beautiful implied, as in the much later Keats phrase, some sort of "truth" about the nature of the world, then I would say that's a fair generalization.

The problem is, though, aeshetics did not begin or end with Plato or any other ancient Greek writer (even if the Greeks coined the word).

I think you fail to take into account the fact that even though perceived ugliness should in theory repel audiences in droves, the fact is that throughout history (and prehistory) there has always been a fascination with the outrageously-ugly. You see it in the Greek myths, with deformed Hephaestus and half-animal Pan standing apart from the perfect Olympian deities. You see it in anonymous folktales and in authored fairy tales like "Beauty and the Beast." You see it in the Gothic novels that sprang out of the so-called Age of Reason, in the Romantics and the Decadents. And yes, the fascination has even been in comic books from the very beginning. Often it may've been projected onto villains, but even technically-handsome heroes like Batman, the Hangman and Plastic Man all have aspects of the grim and the grotesque, while monster-heroes like the Thing and the Hulk brought the grotesque to the fore as never before.

I will agree, Pat, that there can be a literary pleasure in extolling the beauties of nature, of the human form, or what have you. However, even if the ancient Greeks didn't have a word corresponding to our "grotesquerie," I think they knew its appeal: not for nothing did some Greek critics trace the form of the "tragedy" from the so-called "satyr-play," which supposedly involved low comedy with the eponymous animal-creatures.

I think humans have in them both the desire to build things up, and the desire to see them torn down, or at least humbled. These desires occur both in real life (where both can be harmful in varying ways) and in fiction (where both are relatively harmless). I think you've fixed on the first desire as the only desire worthy of inhabiting your aesthetic universe, and that's your privilege. But I think a fuller aesthetics takes in the fascination of both the beautiful and the grotesque, because both impulses are to varying degrees a part of us all.

And you don't even have to like SOUTH PARK to admit that.

In the marketplace of art, many times the public consumer doesn't get to see the "grotesque" because the artist it told flat out the art they don't like won't be duplicated for the masses on their dime.

Some artists have to go from production company to production company, and often have to CHANGE their 'Art' to even get their work in front of the public.

This past weekend Sheryl Crow was featured on 60 Minutes: Couldn't have said it better myself.

Now I'll sit back with my brand new Wired magazine and read about the fall of the music industry.

----


"How much you want to bet that the entire music industry collapses? And I mean soon - like five, ten years. Kaboom!"
--Timothy White(1952-2002) editor Billboard magazine to Charles C. Mann (WIRED magazine, Feb 2003)

I just want to know how the ancient Greeks drew the line between the art in Hate and Don Martin's work. (Pat: Don was an artist in Mad magazine for many years.)

Compare and contrast:

[img]http://www.toonisland.com/alan/groening/dmartin4.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.peterbagge.com/images/hate1.jpg[/img]

Messrs. Merriam and Webster disagree with you. I stand by my spelling.



Nope. I'm sure there's stuff you think is ugly that I don't. There's plenty of stuff I think is ugly that other folks like, like Paul Pope's comics. But that doesn't mean that they are inherently ugly-- someone else might think them beautiful.

It's when people start using these terms as objective measures that I've got a problem with it.

Clement Greenberg spelled it 'esthetic' and the majority of philosophers would spell it 'aesthetic' -- the point being is there is no point to be made. I believe the 'a' was dropped to bring the word more in line with modern day spelling, but it never really caught on (with an 'a' is clearly the most frequent spelling, so I guess that's something of a point).

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1811_302/72732951/print.jhtml

Lexicographers often disagree about spellings and definitions as much as everyone here disagrees about comics, which is why using the lack of information in a particular dictionary entry to prove an argument is moot.