Brian Eno's Ugliness Theory

This excerpt from Eno’s autobiography (English music producer, especially in electronic music) goes viral every few months under the label of "ugliness theory."

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

The idea of beauty in culture arises as a celebration of what is conducive to human life: the hunters in cave paintings, the fertile curves of Paleolithic Venuses, the sturdy symmetry of pyramids. This conception casts a massive shadow over the universe, relegating the asymmetric, the fragile, and the useless to the category of the ugly: distant, orphaned, alien.

The not-us.

Then the artist appears and fixes their attention on that ugliness. They do not ignore or hide it but instead observe it closely, with a mix of fascination and defiance. Rather than rejecting it, they embrace it and turn it into raw material. From it, they create a work—one that inevitably generates rejection and ridicule. But in that act, an alchemical process takes place: even through mockery, what was once banished from our anthropocentric conception of reality pierces its semantic wall and becomes part of culture.

Soon, the eye and ear adjust, and what once felt alien starts to feel familiar. Over time, as the future becomes the past, what was once despised turns into an object of nostalgia. And finally, in an ironic twist, what was ugly becomes beautiful.

What is culture laughing at today?