Recently, my wife and I attended a day-long event promoting new evangelistic efforts in our church. While polished and well intentioned, the talks and music at this event came across as triumphalist and superficial. Afterwards, my wife and I felt spiritually deadened by the kitschy Christianity we had experienced. We felt a need for something more honest, raw, and serious—so we spent the evening watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers’ film masterpiece contains much that is ugly: depictions of ugly emotions and events, morally ugly acts, and the intellectual ugliness of stupidity and hubris. And yet, the film is beautiful: it is a pleasing, fitting whole that reveals significant aspects of reality. It is beautiful not despite its ugliness, but because of how that ugliness is skillfully depicted and integrated into the whole film. Its half-hopeful grappling with the problem of evil thereby appears far more spiritually rich than any amount of happy-clappy religion.

Mark Roche does not discuss No Country for Old Men in his remarkable book, Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts, but he brilliantly analyzes the sort of experience my wife and I had when watching this film. Art during modernity is awash in ugliness, in part because there are many features of modern life that are ugly, but also because many artists attend to ugly aspects of reality that have sometimes been glossed over by past artists. Modern artists have also discovered new ways that depictions of ugliness can be aesthetically excellent, and, in that sense, beautiful. Beautiful Ugliness is a guidebook for navigating the landscape of ugly art, helpfully presenting a wide range of examples from all artistic genres, and, more importantly, developing a taxonomy of kinds of “beautiful ugliness,” ways in which ugliness contributes to the beauty of an artwork. 

Ugliness, for Roche, is not merely what is repugnant to some audiences, but “an appearance that contradicts what belongs to the normative concept of an object. Roche is an “objective idealist” in the tradition of Plato and Hegel. One benefit of this book is that it introduces the reader to many little-known members of the Hegelian tradition, who are fine philosophers of ugliness, but whose work is unexplored in English. As an objective idealist, Roche thinks that reason can access objective knowledge about reality, even apart from experience, and that the laws and norms discovered by reason just are the laws and norms of reality. Human beings are capable of objectively judging when something is ugly, when it lacks appearances that it ought to have given the kind of thing that it is, and when an artistic presentation of ugliness (or beauty) is done well or badly. 

Using this refreshingly non-subjective approach, Roche shows that convergences between ugliness and beauty fall into a few basic kinds. In what he calls “styles” of beautiful ugliness, they converge in the relationship between the formal features of an artwork and its content. Ugly content can be depicted in a beautiful form, which he calls “repugnant beauty,” as in Dante’s Inferno or Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. Or, in the opposite arrangement, “fractured beauty,” beautiful content can be depicted in a formally ugly or distorted style. This is done, for example, to satirize the content or to increase a sense of vitality, as in some surrealist, cubist, and expressionist portraits of women by Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning. A higher style of beautiful ugliness—which, following the Hegelian dialectical pattern, synthesizes the two previous styles—is “aischric beauty,” the depiction of ugly content in a formally ugly way, as in the distorted paintings of morally ugly people by post-World War One German painters Max Beckmann and Otto Dix. If beauty is a harmony of form and content, then this style of art, which harmonizes ugly form and ugly content, achieves a genuine, if paradoxical, kind of beauty, which, like all beauties, reveals something profound about reality.

In what Roche calls “structures” of beautiful ugliness, ugliness and beauty converge in the relationship between the parts and whole of an artwork. Some artworks exhibit “beauty dwelling in ugliness,” in which ugliness is beautifully depicted, without any part of that artwork critiquing that ugliness—as in the ugly sounds and content exhibited by punk rock or the blues. Other works, like many satires (Roche emphasizes Juvenal’s ninth satire as a paradigm case), possess “dialectical beauty.” Parts of these artworks depict ugliness, especially moral and intellectual ugliness, and other parts of that artwork critique that ugliness, but without resolving or redeeming it. Again, these two structures can be synthesized. An artwork with “speculative beauty” depicts ugliness honestly, and critiques it, but that ugliness is then taken up into and redeemed by a more beautiful whole. In the most beautiful and moving section of the book, Roche describes how this kind of beauty is achieved especially in “dramas of redemption,” like Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus or Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. 

The idea that ugliness can both be a fitting focus of art and be ultimately overcome in a larger redemptive whole is rooted in the Christian tradition. As a thinker rooted in that tradition, Roche could easily have been dismissive—as many traditional and conservative Christian thinkers and art lovers have been—of ugly modern art. But he sees that attentiveness to the ugly is a key part of the Christian tradition. Christianity’s attentiveness to the depravity of sin and to the Cross means that ugliness must be part of serious Christian art. 

Roche’s favorite example is the grotesque but sublime crucifixion panel in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. We cannot really grasp the reality of sin or the Cross if we avoid looking squarely at their ugliness; we can do that better when we have artworks in which that ugliness is beautifully depicted, but is also shown to have a place in a larger, beautiful whole, as the crucifixion is seen in the context of the beautiful story of redemption. Roche observes that “faith in this larger arc” from crucifixion to resurrection “gives Christians the strength to linger in the abyss.” The Christian critic is thus in a good position to fully appreciate much of the darkness of modern art. The ugliness of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or Krysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, for example, reveals the horror of war, and they call forth an empathy for the victims of war that could not be effected by an artwork that shied away from that ugliness, an empathy that should be central to Christian life.

The real danger for Christian art is not ugliness but kitsch, that is, “sentimental, tacky, formulaic works that eschew ugliness and lack tension.” Kitsch exists only for the sake of sensuous or emotional enjoyment. Roche does not deny that there can be purely beautiful artworks that lack ugliness, and yet are not kitsch. What differentiates this “radiant beauty,” as found, say, in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, from the kitsch of, for example, Thomas Kinkade’s Home for the Holidays, is that the latter, but not the former, lacks tension and depth. Kitsch lacks any negative moment that requires effort to overcome. Like pornography, kitsch exists purely to stimulate and satisfy superficial feelings; like socialist realism, it is easily used to prop up corrupt politics. Roche sees recent Christian artistic sensibilities as particularly susceptible to the lure of kitsch, and he sees the turn to the ugly as a needed corrective to that danger. Anyone who has seen many recent Christian movies surely can’t help at least partly agreeing.

And yet, despite my broad agreement with Roche on the importance of ugliness or tension in serious art, and despite my own strong distaste for kitsch, I think there’s a real danger in the wholesale condemnation of kitsch that animates a lot of this book. In striving to always be serious about the ugliness and suffering of the world, and to always attend to these things in artworks, one risks condemning or overlooking what genuine but purely positive beauty reveals about the world. One risks a kind of smugness about one’s ability to cope with the suffering of the world, about one’s superior taste, and about the poor benighted people who must take ostrich-like refuge in kitsch rather than face up to suffering. While there is certainly a danger of using kitsch purely for escape or for turning a blind eye to unjust situations, this is not the only use of kitschy artworks. 

Many of those I have known who love kitschy statues of Jesus and Kinkade paintings of cottages—like many pious grandmothers at my church—have come to be aware of something profound about reality precisely through these artworks. These people are not blind to the sufferings of this world; indeed, many of them have experienced great suffering. Nor are they merely seeking to escape this suffering through looking at kitsch. Even though kitschy pieces are in many ways terrible as works of art, they do reveal something about the joy and peace at the heart of reality. It is not only (as Martin Heidegger has it) negative feelings like anxiety that put us in touch with reality, such that only dark, ugly art would reveal the world as it truly is. Reality is also revealed (as Edith Stein says) through childlike joy, the joy innocent and simple enough to delight in gaudy Christmas decorations and sentimental songs.

Roche is not unaware of this danger in his position. That he is not unaware of it makes it all the more irksome when he gives nods to ostensibly sophisticated pieties about art, for instance by seeing the tradition of painting the female nude as always a “dehumanizing abstraction.” The empathy that Roche so rightly and generously extends to artists who depict ugliness should have been extended, perhaps, to the makers of kitsch or to more members of the older tradition. Still, it is to Roche’s credit that he not only resists kitsch (which, despite my partial defense above, really is a problem in recent Christian art) but also resists indiscriminately celebrating all instances of ugly art. Just as kitsch plays upon positive emotions without more deeply revealing reality, so ugly art often exists purely to promote feelings of shock, outrage, or transgression. Roche gives numerous examples of appalling films, performance art pieces, postmodern buildings, and art installations that do this. Paralleling the idea of kitsch, he calls these pieces “quatsch,” a German word meaning “bunk, nonsense, or bullshit.” Like kitsch, quatsch has no depth and should be rejected as bad art. As I noted above, Roche’s idealism leads him to see beauty and ugliness as subject to objective norms and standards of evaluation. Too often, critics are unwilling to condemn quatsch because they wish to seem sophisticated, but since nothing really positive can be said about these works, all they can say is that they are “interesting.” But Roche is clear: attending to the norms governing artworks should lead us to condemn many ugly works of art as devoid of aesthetic or moral value. 

I hope that more critics adopt this category of quatsch, and there are certainly works that should be rejected on these grounds. And yet, again, I worry that, as with kitsch, Roche may be too quick to dismiss it. I would have liked to see a greater attempt made to redeem even these works of art. He is, again, aware of this danger: he notes that some works that seem prima facie to be quatsch might turn out to reveal something important about reality. 

One of the greatest benefits of reading this fine book is that it inculcates a greater generosity of vision, especially for those inclined to prefer only more traditional artworks. His categories mostly accomplish the remarkable feat of guiding us to an aesthetic, moral, and even theological appreciation of what all artists are doing and showing how even ugly art has a place in a larger, redemptive whole. Even more remarkably, his categories guide us to this vision without requiring wholesale approbation of all art and without abandoning the critic’s vocation to make normative evaluations of art. If Roche is sometimes not as generous as his categories should guide him to be, that is no strike against the categories themselves. It is just a sign of how difficult it is to always be charitable, and a call to the rest of us to be more diligent in our practice of charity, even towards ugly artworks.