BE ALARMED, IT'S ART
Beauty doen't have to be roses and prettiness, it can be hard and confronting as well. I guess it's obvious that asesthetics don't have to be agreeable or soothing, they can be arresting in a challlenjging manner too. Aesthetics in the true sense doesn't mean prettiness, it means qualities of attractive character. Sometimes you can be attracted to ugly things on an intriuging or facinating level. Like some horror movie fans who get into gore (`gorehounds'). They have magazine communities based on this `brand' of movie genre. These buffs would admit there's something attractive about gore films or maybe splatter horror. It's a style of aesthetic, a qualitative characteristic of the medium that they enjoy most over others. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which understates the originality of each different appreciator's unique taste in art. Any great artist will accept that he can't please all palates. We've had periods in the west of both ends of the spectrum, take the gothic period in nortrhern european church art where the church-state dictated that all art must be made for the church and a common style (gothic) was prevalent, narrowing creative scope as a result. Lots of gargoyles sculpted and other twisted concoctions as a product of so much creative repression (sometimes humourous!). Bosch had his surreal moments during the middle ages as a result perhaps of much cultural turmoil and upheavel, providing scarier creations than the gothic period i.m.h.o. And when things were economically fruitful, the baroque period produced some exhuburently flowery expressions of the beauty and colour of life. A period of which kind of reminds me of where we are now and also of where we were in the 80's for a brief spell. In times of sociological complacency, creatives have always violently protested against such norms of the slumbering suburban self-contented consciousness. After the first World War, the Dadaists who had retreated to a caberet joint in Zurich started thier random little protests after the horror they had recently faced in Europe. The ramifications of these gatherings of hilarious and defiant poetic perfomances triggered a ripple-effect of art movements past the devastions of WWII, through pop art (who hailed Duchamp as their king), post-pop, post-modernism to art in its present day practices. Punks like Jeff Koons are to be applauded and respected for their resiliant and defiant support for this tradition, regardless of how much money is thrown around. Any artist who can stand up againt the hypocrisy of the system he/she lives in with work that challenges it in a confonting, arresting, provocative and maybe graphic way needs the support of his/her community and even their attention for a moment. There might be something important, apropriate or integral to our own livelihood being said.
