Accept and solve
Looking back on the development of western aesthetics, we can see that traditional aesthetics rejects reality ugliness. The ancient Greeks once proudly declared: "We are people who love beauty!" There is no doubt that they refuse ugliness. Therefore, they do not hesitate to explicitly stipulate in the law: "Don't be ugly!" . (5) China seems to have attached importance to ugliness from the beginning: there are images such as "old tree", "withered vine" and "faint crow" in his poems; In calligraphy, there are words such as "spirit", "quaint" and "Gu Zhuo". Obviously, art has accepted ugliness again. The fundamental reason why western traditional aesthetics does not accept the ugliness of reality is rationalism refusal. When Kant's On the Sublime can be regarded as the bud of ugliness, when the field of aesthetics in Nietzsche's era declared the death of beauty, ugliness was born. In the 20th century, it has become inevitable for Ye Chou to enter the art palace.
Judging from the manifestations of human aesthetic activities, sublimity and beauty are generally called value or positive value, while ugliness and inferiority are called negative value or negative value. Both positive value and negative value are manifestations of beauty. When I was young, Ou Mo was very beautiful and could be described as "beautiful Ou Mo", while when I was old, Ou Mo could be described as "ugly Ou Mo". Gesell praised Rodin's sculpture as "too ugly". This compliment can show that ugliness is an advanced aesthetic form of beauty. There is no doubt that the acceptance of ugliness by art is the need of art communication itself and human beings themselves. Man's transcendence consists of two instincts: creativity and destructiveness. The ugliness of reality corresponds to the destructiveness here. Once human life activities need them to fight against the perceptual existence such as terror, evil, madness, maggots, diseases and cancer. It is necessary to have a virtual insight and struggle against the ugliness of reality. In the Middle Ages, when people saw themselves from the Oracle that "God is beautiful", they found that the whole society was ugly and everything was "the son of God". During the Renaissance, when people realized their falsehood, they found that "man is God and man is his own God". Contemporary people say when they have insight into themselves: "Man is his own hell". It can be said that people's acceptance of ugliness is the necessity of human self-development. Therefore, reality ugliness will inevitably become the source of artistic beauty creation.
How the accepted ugliness disappears into the beauty of reality requires the artist to reconstruct the content and form of the ugliness of reality. The nutritional elements of artistic beauty depend on the artist's deconstruction of reality ugliness. Lessing said: "Ugliness becomes beneficial after artistic imitation." The "advantage" here is reconstructed through artistic imitation. As far as formal construction is concerned, artistic beauty mostly dispels natural ugliness. For example, people often dislike barking dogs and pigs in life, but some people applaud this dislike on the art stage. The so-called ugliness in nature can be transformed into beauty in art, which is a subjective effort to dispel the ugliness in reality; As far as content construction is concerned, artistic beauty mostly dispels social ugliness. The "Ah Q" in Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q can be described as social ugliness, but this work shines with the aura of the social and ideological value of typical characters. Of course, the deconstruction and reconstruction of the form and content of reality ugliness by artistic beauty is not isolated. Mao Zedong wrote in Bodhisattva Bharti: "The village wall in front of the bullet hole decorates this mountain." ⑦ The bullet hole after the fierce battle is naturally a sad and withered image, but it can actually "decorate the mountain" under the refraction of "the setting sun after the rain", that is, it combines the ugly bullet hole in nature with the ugly Kuomintang in society and reconstructs a beautiful landscape that looks better now, but "ugliness" means a form of decadence and a decline in content. Why is it dissolved into a source by artistic beauty? First of all, we should look at the formal characteristics of reality ugliness. It is distorted, damaged and miscellaneous, morbid and decadent, and its fundamental feature is anti-patterning, denying the inherent pattern and structure. But from the perceptual form, we realize that "ugliness shows the exuberance of vitality and triggers a vicious and abused pleasure". Judging from the social content of realistic ugliness, realistic ugliness shows the existence of a kind of negative thinking, which tends to have negative aesthetic value and focuses on revealing the finiteness and incompleteness of reason. Whether it is the form of reality ugliness or the content of reality ugliness. All these provide the inevitability for acceptance and settlement.
Turn ugliness into ugliness and appreciate ugliness.
"Ugliness" means that ugliness is typical. This is the aesthetic mechanism of "turning ugliness into beauty". The process of "transformation" is the aesthetic process of the subject's understanding and understanding of the object. The typification of realistic ugliness aims at expressing ugliness and exposing ugliness. The negative images in all dramas and movies are of course ugly, but it is the beauty of artistic creation purpose that denies them under the care of artists. However, "culture" is irreversible, because successful artistic production should not have the aesthetic category of "artistic ugliness", which means the failure of artists' creation. But those who are ugly for the sake of ugliness will step into the ugly reality, which is a misunderstanding of artistic beauty. It can be seen that the ugliness of reality can be transformed into artistic beauty, but artistic beauty cannot be transformed into the ugliness of reality.
Once the ugliness of reality enters art, it enters the aesthetic collar as an aesthetic object, and "appreciating ugliness" is actually aesthetics. For those who appreciate ugliness, what is needed is "empty enlightenment" and "thorough introspection", which instinctively excludes ugliness from their own aesthetic feelings and transcends themselves and reality ugliness itself. In short, it is to recast your own aesthetic feeling on the basis of negative aesthetic feeling. For example, when appreciating Jin Ping Mei, a work that combines truth and ugliness, an ugly critic should see from the vulgar and wanton characters' ugly dramas in the work that their ugliness is nothing more than cancer and sores growing on the body of feudal society, and it is the product of chaotic society and depravity of human nature. This aesthetic thinking is to admit the existence of affirmation by denying affirmation. This is actually the ultimate goal of judging ugliness.
Mutual solubility and mutual benefit
The realistic ugliness in artistic beauty is like "the truth lies in poetry, the salt in water is spent in honey, the body is hidden, and the taste is gone." Pet-name ruby "reason", "water" and "honey" are the existence of the artist's aesthetic value; "Invisible body" and "no trace" are the aesthetic concern of artists, that is, ugliness critics; "Existence of sex" is the existence of the essential characteristics of realistic ugliness, and "taste" is the value existence of realistic ugliness in artistic beauty. On the one hand, realistic ugliness provides "solute" for artistic beauty, on the other hand, artistic beauty provides "solvent" for realistic ugliness. Therefore, realistic ugliness and artistic beauty are mutually soluble, which is manifested in the aesthetic relationship between function and reaction. Just as "Ugliness" provided the content of artistic communication for "Jin Ping Mei", it also gained aesthetic value. This value is people's evaluation value. As far as the evaluation process of reality ugliness is concerned, it was denied in life at first. In order to pursue beauty, people must recognize ugliness and overcome it, so that artists can truly reflect it. At this time, the guiding significance of realistic ugliness appreciation is affirmative, which embodies the truth that conforms to the law. At the same time, the ugliness of reality permeates the artistic image of the artist's negative evaluation, affirms beauty from the opposite side and embodies the goodness of purpose. "Truth in accordance with the law" and "goodness in accordance with the purpose" are jointly constructed and mutually dissolved into the beauty of reality with special value.
If the aesthetic value is regarded as the backbone of a plant, then the ugliness of reality and the beauty of art are like two opposing green leaves. Artistic beauty realizes its own aesthetic refraction value with realistic ugliness; Ugliness in reality broadens the value of aesthetic vision for artistic beauty. The light of aesthetic refraction originates from the ugliness of reality, and the existence of aesthetic visual edge has objective rational discourse. The emotional categories such as loneliness, fear, worry, despair and cynicism abstracted from rationality make us feel the existence of alienation and understand the anti-art in modern western countries. Just as Zhang Zhupo affirmed that ugliness entered the novel on a large scale in the review of Jin Ping Mei, the novel not only made the ugliness of reality gain the value of survival, but also greatly enriched the aesthetic vision of China's novels. This is a special value tendency that realistic ugliness and artistic beauty are compatible.
summary
To sum up, artistic beauty not only does not exclude realistic ugliness, but also makes realistic ugliness the source of artistic beauty through acceptance and elimination; The aesthetic mechanism of "turning ugliness into beauty" shows a unique aesthetic relationship of one-way transformation; At the same time, they interact with each other, showing the aesthetic relationship between action and reaction. But people pay special attention to the reality of ugliness in aesthetics, because the existence of ugliness does not lie in itself, but in that it can inspire human beings to pursue higher beauty.