Beauty in art: synthesis of the beautiful and the ugly

Abstract

Beauty is that category of aesthetics, the definition of which is still the subject of controversy among philosophers and art researchers. Beauty is both objective and subjective, absolute and relative, it is an imperative of art and it develops historically. Beauty forms a dialectical triad together with two other leading aesthetic categories — the beautiful and the ugly. In this triad, different types of synthesis of the beautiful and the ugly form the basis of historical types of beauty. Philosophers, artists, art researchers have always had a professional interest in the dialectical connection «beautiful-ugly». However, firstly, the relations between these categories have not been studied previously from the standpoint of their dialectical analysis and synthesis at the same time. Secondly, different types of synthesis of the beautiful and the ugly did not stand out. These two conditions are taken into account in the article. In addition, beauty is considered as an aesthetic meta–category in the context of the dialectical triad «beautiful — ugly — beauty». Together, this made it possible to describe, explain and predict the change of historical types of beauty in the arts in the article. According to the author’s concept, three such objective types are distinguished and they correspond to the mimetic, non-mimetic and post-mimetic stages of the development of spatial arts. So the beautiful dominates the ugly (the art of the Ancient World, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern times); the beautiful borders on the ugly (the art of modernism); the ugly dominates the beautiful (the art of postmodernism). The author also substantiates the assumption that today the next type of beauty has appeared. It arose like the previous ones in the conditions of radical changes in the artistic perception of the system-organizational principles of the Universe.