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FIRST CONFERENCE OF AESTHETIC RESPONSIBILITY
APRIL 3, 1962, HOTEL PLAZA, AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

Reinhardt

Who is responsible for Ugliness? What is "ugly"?
The question, if raised by "salesmen" of "beauty", is ugly.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves.
Art as a commodity is an ugly idea.
Art as an entertainment is an ugly activity.
Painting as a "profession of pleasing and selling" is an ugly business.
Art-dealing, art-collecting, art-manipulating, art-jobbing, are ugly.
Art as a "means of livelihood", as a means of "living it up", is ugly.
The expression "An artist has to eat" is ugly.
(An artist does not have to eat anymore than anyone else.)
Economic relations in art are primitive and ugly.
Artists once led less ugly lives than other men. Today artists lead the same kind of life as other men. The artist as business-man is uglier than the business-man as artist.
The artist as a patronized-idiot or "innocent", company-man, collectors' item, successful-schnook or eager-beefer, is ugly.
Knowing on which side one's bread is buttered in art is ugly.

"Bumpkin-Dionysianism" or "Dionysian-Bumpkinism" in art is ugly.
Primitivism, irrationalism, anti-intellectualism in art is ugly.
Surrealism and Expressionism in art is ugly.
The "Cult of the Ugly" is a Rococo, Romantic, Realist art idea.
Anti-Art as pro-life is ugly.
Collage, "Assemblage", "Junk", and "Brute" art is ugly.
Ugly geometric art is uglier than expressionist art.
The mixture or integration of separate, different arts is ugly.
"Poetic", "musical", "sculptural", "mural" painting are ugly.
"Painterly" painting is ugly.
"Imaginative", "visionary", "original", "natural" art is ugly.
Making a graven image, or any manner of likeness is ugly, and an "abomination of Satan's work".

Art confused with life, nature, society, politics, religion is ugly.
Art as a thing to be used for some other end is ugly.
Government sponsorship of art is ugly. Absence of government sponsorship of art is uglier.
Art in Industry is as ugly as industry in art.
The tricks of the art-trades are ugly.
The ugliest exhibitions of art in America in recent years were the "New Images of Man" show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the "Nature in Abstraction" and "Geometric Abstraction" shows at the Whitney Museum.
Museum art-marketing, art-promotion, art-history-manufacturing are ugly.

Art as a "good thing" or a "sure thing" is ugly.
The "Age of Accomodation" in art is ugly.
The "Age of the Shrug" in art is ugly.
Signs of affluence in art is ugly.
Signs of poverty in art are ugly.
An ugly customer in art is not an ugly duckling.
When things "take an ugly turn" in art, there is "the devil to pay".
"Why fight it" and "That's life" are ugly expressions.
Profit, interest, property, exploitation, in art are ugly.

Consciencelessness and subconsciousness in art are ugly.
Artists are responsible for ugliness.