Kakophilia In Modern Art

There is method in beauty. It can be mathematically verified. There is only one Golden Section, a.k.a. the Divine Proportion. The closer to it you get, the more beautiful comes out your artefact. The problem is that the area right around has been overexplored in the course of the humankind's history. The possibilities are by large exhausted, it is next to impossible to come up with something new.

That is unless you step away from the Golden Section to fill in the missing parts of the art paradigm that were left void for one good reason: they are ugly, unappealing to the human eye and aesthetic sense. But what of it as long as you can claim to be original! Australian art historian Arthur Danto coined a new word for this kind of conscious shunning the universally accepted beauty standard: kallophobia – the fear of beautiful.

Modern artists calculatedly venture away the Divine Proportion because it's easier to get noticed. At some point of time there was a point to it: a pure scientific desire to make up the whole paradigm of possible art forms, shapes and sounds. Once it was the manifesto of rebels breaking away from the ossified academic art: there was honesty and a message in impressionism, cubism and futurism. Fast forward to post-modernity: desperate ego-bloating, marketing trickery, shameless bluffery.

The situation is not aided by the explosive expansion of art market where aesthetically challenged but loaded buyers see nothing but a great investment opportunity in often mediocre and quite often ugly pieces of art. Bankers and brokers, whose ballyhooed MBA courses sure never included art history modules, buy out whole exhibitions of drab, spam and scum even before they open. Hedge fund dealers adorn their fancy living rooms with God-awful doodles in the hope of windfalls at the next Sotheby’s auction. Wherever you go, city officials out of fear to come across square waste taxpayers’ money to commission abhorrent monstrosities for public spaces. Year after year aspiring artists are trained in art academies to objectify the worst demons and dirtiest garbage from their subconscious into “art” and spurt it out on unsuspecting audiences.

This phenomenon is so widespread that it deserves a fancy name, a word that best describes its true essence: kakophilia, the Greek for "love for shit". This inflatable faeces "masterpiece" epitomizes the trend. There is no end in siight: for every Damien Hirst there seems to be a Russian billionaire.