Thoughts on the modern definition of beauty and ugliness in art

If I agree that the human voice can express emotion, and that music fundamentally seems to imitate the human voice, music can this way also refine the human voice and make of it sublime music. But “music” can also express the opposite, ugly, painful sounds, as atonal (disordered) music often does.

Modern art in general has refused to label disorder, pain, disharmony or ugliness as low art, and refused to label order, pleasure, harmony, tonality, reality or traditional beauty as high art. Music and art in general might this way be labeled either noble and sublime, or ignoble and absurd.

It is difficult to believe that people actually prefer sounds or sights of pain and disorder to sounds and sights of pleasure and order---just as beautiful people are usually preferred to ugly people. This makes it seem that people who claim to prefer ugliness, pain, disorder and atonality are not telling the truth, or have other motives. What might they be?

Promoting art that patronizes disorder, pain, and disharmony is probably related to the desire to destroy the culture or the people who affirm order, pleasure, and harmony. In other words, modern “art” is not about art, it is about destruction, it is more like political and cultural propaganda. Interesting that postmodern philosophy would agree with this, but for Marxist reasons.

Later followers of the anti-life art perspective might not have the same destructive motives as the original purposeful tone-deaf philosophers of ugliness, and may somehow be taught to like ugliness and disorder, or pretend to like it, especially if their educational success depends on it.