If I can use music as a metaphor for a second - most of the music I love deeply is probably regarded as ugly by a lot of people. And I'm not talking about extr

If I can use music as a metaphor for a second - most of the music I love deeply is probably regarded as ugly by a lot of people. And I'm not talking about extreme serialism, avant-garde noise sculptures or anything too tricky. I'm talking about stuff I'd be happy to defend on it's intrinsic merits and stuff that genuinely gives me the same emotional response as a lot of the more mainstream music I like. So - moving back to art - I don't know what your tastes are. Maybe you only like pretty paintings of flowers. But assuming you are moderately eclectic in your tastes I would almost guarantee that a lot of the art you regard as non-ugly was regarded as heretical when it was first produced. Don't forget that romanticism in music and the visual arts was once regarded as a provocative and dangerously subversive trend. (Back to music because I know more about it than painting) Handel would have Beethoven incomprehensible. In fact the Große Fuge was regarded as incomprehensible for quite some time after Beethoven's death. There truly is no such thing as "ugliness" in any reasonably objective sense. Context, culture and time change everything. EDIT - I've got no particular love of modern high-end art but that's largely because it seems like an elitist, vacuous, cultural backwater than because of anything to do with the supposed "ugliness" of modern art.