Abstract
Disgust has been a perennial feature of art from medieval visions of hell to postmodern travesties. The purpose of this chapter is to chart various ways in which disgust functions in artworks both in terms of content and style, canvassing cases in which the content and/or style is literally disgusting in contrast to cases where the disgust serves to characterize the content, often for moral or political or broader cultural purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
While the first three are well-known figures of Ancient Greek mythology, Grendel is a character in the Old English epic story Beowulf (ca 700–1000 CE).
- 2.
- 3.
The term, now considered offensive by many, has a troubled history and used to refer to those who are perceived to be physically deformed in significant ways, or to have certain types of “non-normative bodies”; cf. Stephens (2005).
- 4.
Here Kant is reiterating the view that he had put forward in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), where he stated that “Nothing is so opposed to the beautiful as the disgusting…”; see Kant (2007), p. 44. Kant was not alone in holding the view that disgust is strongly antithetical to aesthetic pleasure, nor was he the first to express it. Moses Mendelssohn, in his “82nd Letter Concerning Literature” (1760), said that “The sensations of disgust thus are always nature, never imitation,” and that in disgust “the soul does not recognize any obvious admixture of pleasure”; see Menninghaus (2003). Lessing (1766/1962) quoted Mendelssohn approvingly on this topic. Even (almost) a century later, Schopenhauer (1859/1969) rehashed the same view when he said that the disgusting had “always been recognised as absolutely inadmissible in art, where even the ugly can be tolerated in its proper place so long as it is not disgusting,” p. 208.
- 5.
- 6.
Note however that the orthogonality in question is not complete, since no fiction arguably falls under the confrontation side of Matravers’s dichotomy. For a critical take on Matravers’s argument, see Carroll (2016).
- 7.
See Contesi (2016), pp. 349–50n for some reasons to prefer a presence/representation distinction to Matravers’s confrontation/representation dichotomy.
- 8.
A similar case in this respect is Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990), which we discuss later as a member of our second category.
- 9.
Here, it might be surmised that birthing is disgusting (at least in part) in virtue of a process of cultural construction influenced by patriarchal ideologies. That may be the case, although bodily fluids and orifices generally (and so also those not involved in birthing and outside of the birthing context) are very common disgust elicitors. Nonetheless, acknowledging that the common response of many viewers of the images and films in question is one of disgust is compatible with accepting a cultural-construction view.
- 10.
Such transference is of course driven by culture to a significant extent and is, accordingly, significantly variable cross-culturally. See Chapman et al. (2009) for an outline, from the perspective of cognitive science, of the ways in which disgust can be mobilized to moral ends.
- 11.
We are grateful to the following for comments on earlier versions of this chapter: the editors of this volume, Raciel Cuevas, Peter Lamarque, and audiences at the Universities of Milan and York. Contesi acknowledges the generous support of the US–Italy Fulbright Research Scholar Program, the Temple University Department of Philosophy and the LOGOS Research Group (University of Barcelona).
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Carroll, N., Contesi, F. (2019). A Taxonomy of Disgust in Art. In: Tavin, K., Kallio-Tavin, M., Ryynänen, M. (eds) Art, Excess, and Education. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21828-7_2
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