Aesthetics of Ugliness

Treating phenomena from the sublime to the comic in visual art and literature from the Greeks to Eug ne Sue, the student and critic of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz, shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used in the conventional condemnation of ugliness. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote K nigsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernisation and idealist aesthetics makes The Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty. The first English translation of a key text in the history of art and aesthetics, The Aesthetics of Ugliness is a key text for modern aesthetics and modernist art.