snobbess's review of On Ugliness
On Ugliness by Umberto Eco
When I saw him speak on Tuesday, he stated that beauty elicits contemplation (hence his book On Beauty from a few years ago), while ugliness is more fascinating in that it elicits a number of responses from fear to disgust to curiosity to pity. He also said that historically there are not many philosophical writings on ugliness, so the vein of research for this book was very different than On Beauty. Just as extreme genetic anomalies allow for the examination of the nature of "normalcy" in scientific study, so a study of ideas of ugliness would seem to allow for the scrutinization of aesthetics in general. I'm very curious to read the whole thing beyond excerpts.
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