ON UGLINESS - UMBERTO ECO

A companion piece to HISTORY OF BEAUTY, a set I wish I owned. They’re really gorgeous books with really high-quality and ample full-color reproductions of hundreds of artworks. The selection of artworks Eco chooses ranges from the very obscure and forgotten to major, marquee names in Western art. The project itself is mostly about this selection, Eco is sort of a visual art DJ, but the pedantic-type, like someone who’d make a mix tracing the “Dembow” rhythm (to be clear, I love that sort of shit). I would say that, if pressed, this is the better volume. Truly, they should be considered as a set, but I would say ON UGLINESS is more wide ranging and interesting and that Ugliness as a subject is clearly more interesting to Eco. Which makes sense, Beauty is static, in the Western mind, a sort of eternal, platonic ideal. Eco does a good job poking holes in this and showing how Beauty does, in fact, change with time and culture, but it’s a much more complicated and nuanced argument than just pointing out the things that aren’t beautiful. Also, ugliness is just more fun. You get to see all these crazy medieval monsters, and paintings of the War-wounded as well as devils and prostitutes and bizarro avant-garde weirdness. Ugliness goes more places, and is really only defined as “things that aren’t beautiful.” Even in HISTORY OF BEAUTY Eco sort of pads it out by including chapters about ugliness in order to show what Beauty isn’t. I think that makes sense, but this book is basically these sections flushed out. This leads to a bit of redundancy. In fact, the Baudelaire quote I’ve remembered for almost a decade since college, is in both. But either way, I love this book, I wish I owned it. 13 ugly scenes.