Why Was There So Much Ugly Art in the Twentieth Century?

This essay notes that two trends seem apparent. First, the pursuit of beauty-production as an artistic goal goes down from Post-Impressionism to the present. Second, since the eighteenth century, objective, formalist treatments of artistic merit have given way to subjective accounts. With these subjective accounts comes antirealist sentiment. The author suggests that a marriage of these two trends allows us to explain the former in terms of the latter, and while this is but one explanation, it does explain the current state, generally speaking, of why so many artists demure from production of beauty. The answer to the question "why was there so much ugly art in the twentieth century?" may be that the tradition of showing beauty to be a highly or purely subjective phenomenon renders beauty apparently less valuable than if it were objective in character, and so we have, in the twentieth century, a move away from the production in art of beauty to that which is simply "artistic" or "artistically important." The author concludes the paper by arguing positively for beauty-production as a legitimate artistic goal.