The term 'internet ugly' was coined to describe the rise of amateurish, poorly made memes spreading across the internet. It was only about time before such an aesthetic appeared in the fine art world, and it has done so over the last few years. Below are some thoughts.
Full disclosure, I actually enjoy this style of art for the reasons I'll try to explain below. Also, this post is not intended to be a hit piece on the artists that I mention here, and I own (and will continue to buy) a number of works from them. That doesn't, however, absolve the question that I hear more and more from my friends at art galleries – why is it so ugly?
I should also mention that, a day after I wrote a draft of this blog post, Ayanna Dozier published an article on Artsy titled "Why "Ugly" Paintings Are So Popular". This was completely a coincidence! Dozier's article is grounded in the new show at Nahmad Contemporary, titled 'Ugly Painting'. She posits that ugly paintings challenge the conception of beauty, and should not be equated to 'bad' paintings. This reminded me of an interview with the great figurative painter, Glenn Brown, where he said that he tries to include elements of ugliness in all of his paintings, because a viewer's eye lingers longer on something ugly (trying to decide whether it like what it sees) compared to something beautiful (which is quickly understood to be beautiful).
From left to right: Nava (Water Heart Cat, 2020), Bozó (Rule of Six, 2021), and Dwi Antono (Agoraphobia, 2022)
So back to my post, let's take a few modern examples to provide context:
Robert Nava – his childish scribbles and immaturely rendered paintings are said to result from years of trying to 'unteach' himself the formal training that he received during art school.
Szabolcs Bozó – he paints like the illustrations in a Dr Seuss book.
And finally, the more recent works of Roby Dwi Antono, who has stripped back his immaculately rendered earlier surrealist paintings into a series of gestural marks and illusory forms.
From the friends that I mentioned earlier, there is constant commentary that they could have made these artworks. I dispute that in most contexts, but I did, one year for Christmas, gift one friend the supplies to make her own small Nava painting, and her finished work was so indistinguishable from the real thing that most people I showed couldn't correctly guess the real one (see if you can tell below).
Will the real Robert Nava please stand up? One of these sold at auction for £32,760 in 2021, the other one was made by my friend who hasn't painted before. I'll let you guess which is which.
In addition to this attribution of reduced skill and effort, these friends also express the pervasive feeling that the works are simply just ugly and don't deserve to be on the walls of a gallery. This second feeling, while also not something that I share, I can understand. Traditional beauty removes the imperfections and flaws that this style of art purposefully includes and celebrates.
Of course, in the long arc of art history, 'ugly' art (although let's use the term 'challenging' instead) has always been around, and has sometimes been successful. One of the greatest painters of the 21st century, Cy Twombly, was renowned for his childish-like scribbles. His works now hang in some of the greatest offices and most formal institutions today. Yes, this is something to do with the man himself. Twombly was a complex person from all reports (read into this, difficult) and he was a devout reader of poetry and classic books. Twombly's paintings are often named after, or inscribed with passages from, these literary works – think Leda and the Swan, one of my favourite paintings of all time. And another example is Rose Wylie, the darling of the UK art world with her awkward and primitive paintings.
Cy Twombly's Leda and the Swan (1962), courtesy of MoMA
But Twombly also embodied something else, a confidence and irreverence that had to be respected. As I discussed once with a friend, another artist who said he often didn't know how to understand Twombly (this was at a show of Twombly's sculptures at Gagosian in London, works which even I find pointless), I asked him to imagine being in 1962 and showcasing paintings like Leda and the Swan for the first time to high society. It takes enviable confidence, and in this respect Twombly's thick skin was likely an invaluable asset. Yes people probably still stare at a Twombly and think that they could have made it, but there's a confidence to the mark-making – an evident sense of purpose to each one, which fits with the lore that Twombly used to spend 99% of his time just staring at the canvas and wondering what to do next (at least with his early works) and not this frantic haze that I had imagined given rise to the scribbles.
Physiologically, I wonder if these types of works unlock / invoke a particular part of our psyche that links to childhood, that reminds us of a time when the world was simpler but also when everything had wonder. It's how I feel when I look at Twombly's works, but also those of Nava and the others.
Finally, as the title alludes to, Nick Douglas published a paper in December 2014 on the so-called 'internet ugly' aesthetic ("It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic"). The appearance of incredibly lo-fi, badly rendered and cartoonish imagery across the internet (like Pepe the Frog) is a direct response to the way that the computer and digital age promotes high fidelity and perfection. Just like the proclaimed death of photorealistic painting in the 1990s and the response to the development of photography in the late 19th century, representing the world exactly how it is, while useful in some respects, is not often how we see – or want to see – it.
At the fantastic Monet x Mitchell show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2022, I was more struck by how impactful Monet's barely figurative abstractions of landscapes were compared to his more literal works. A painting of a precise landscape is exactly that, that exact landscape. A childish sketch alluding to a landscape, well that can be any landscape and none at all.
And as to its death? To this being a fad and no more? (And perhaps more cynically, to this type of art appealing to a new generation of wealth created by the crypto and NFT booms, who are now desolate again and/or jaded). The historical analogies referred to above show that this simply cannot be the case. These styles develop responsively and will ebb and flow in such a way. To call Nava, as some have, a Twombly reincarnation is to ignore what he is adding to the oeuvre – gone are the poetry and verses, and in their place are mythical creatures, spray paint and fluorescence. But isn't that what we have in the world today, though – slightly more ridiculous, slightly more imperfect.
George
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