Aesthetics of Ugliness - by Karl Rosenkranz

Book Synopsis

In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. 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 Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes 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.

Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly.

Review Quotes

"The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and therewith the ideal of art as such. Appropriately, the Hegel biographer and expositor Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast. Along the way, various fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity are also illuminated. This edition and translation is a very valuable contribution to any discussion of such fundamental issues." --Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA

"The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way - a very valuable contribution to any discussion." --Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA

About the Author

Karl Rosenkranz (1805 -1879) was a German philosopher. He followed Kant and Herbart as professor of philosophy in Königsberg; in 1848-49 he took part in the reform government in Berlin.

Andrei Pop is Associate Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Mechtild Widrich is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.