Why Contemporary Art worships Ugliness
"A Martian landing in Regent's Park this weekend would be jolly confused. There are two Frieze art shows on. One – Frieze Masters – has works of great beauty by Cranach, Brueghel, Zurbaran and Degas. The other – the contemporary Frieze show – has various bits of distended metal, mutilated pornography and a few messages scribbled in children's handwriting. Guess which one is packed.
I suppose it's rather heartening that London is collaring some of the huge amounts of cash that are swilling round the contemporary art world. You can forget the recession here – there are million pound plus price tags on these works, being sold by Germans, Americans, South Americans and British. And the Chinese, too – I don't think Chairman Mao would have been a fan of the Long March Space gallery from Beijing.
But why does it all have to be so extremely ugly? It all comes out of a desire to be avant-garde and, by extension, contrary; and what could be more contrary to the beauty of the pictures at Frieze Masters than the ugliness of those at Frieze? The same goes for the people buying it. Well, for their ugly clothes anyway; at both shows, the people themselves are astonishingly good-looking. I saw one fat person in several hours – a young British girl, of course, but, still, at least she had a little animation to her features.
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