On the contrary, his aesthetic was identical with that of bourgeois culture, sharing with it the imperative that art should be splendid, beautiful, ideal. The foremost shaper of such a conception of art, to many still so obvious as to resemble a law, was perhaps G. E. Lessing, who put the idea into words in his Laocoon, originally published in 1766, in which he writes of the difference between ugliness and beauty in art. The ugly form “wounds our sight, offends our sense of order and harmony, and excites aversion without regard to the actual existence of the object in which we perceive
Not to be confused with Doris Lessing.
Also, interesting , I wonder if Eco has anything to say about this because he has a book on ugliness
