The age of institutionalised ugliness

I know this against my will: the Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant wedding has inched past its first anniversary. The Jio juggernaut has force-fed every film paparazzi Instagram account with fresh footage from their wedding; one of their wedding photographers has been carted to a popular podcast with a tired script about how beautiful, wonderful, and so on the wedding was; and clips from that podcast have been poured like gasoline over my timeline. One of the accounts posted a video of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Mukesh Ambani from the pre-wedding festivities with the caption “One Percent” along with a fire emoji. We are a singed culture—one that cannot distinguish between greed and ambition; how can it ever distinguish between attention and affection?

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There is something pathetic and ugly about the whole aftermath of the Ambani wedding: the desperation with which it demanded the public discourse and the casual entitlement with which it got it. A year on, we have circled back to where we once were, unenthusiastic and unwilling subjects of a technocratic empire.

Ugly as subversive

“Ugly” is a word I use carefully. It has gained a certain cultural import in the past few years. The Spanish fashion house Balenciaga is trying to make ugly into an edgy, high-end couture aesthetic, gaslighting an entire industry that thrives on beauty into believing in the merit of being materially ugly, by reframing the ugly as subversive. The Labubu dolls, expensive designer plush toy monsters described by Liza Corsillo as “kind of ugly, but huggable, with a devilish grin”, are being strung on purses as symbols of class status. A colleague described the Labubu as a “recession indicator”. Wealth that once could be signalled using diamonds and expensive clothes is now being signalled using a toy, which is not even that expensive, comparatively speaking: an ugly, furry toy.

In a capitalist culture where value has been mistaken for virtue, and where we have consciously and forcibly assigned value to ugly things, have we not turned ugliness into what we once believed beauty to be—a virtue around which we organise our deepest desires?

I struggled quite a bit with the word “beauty”, trying to find a definition for it, a framework with which to think about it, when researching my book On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali simply because no definition I was coming across allowed the word to fully breathe through its sensual dimensions. Taking a cerebral, philosophical scalpel to the word felt like an asexual describing of the pleasures of sex, a scholar describing the logic of faith: cold and technical, true in a factual sense but unable to grasp the full, slippery import of the word, unable to tap into an inner logic, perhaps anti-logic, that the word’s experience demands.

This was until I chanced on Chloe Cooper Jones’ luminous text Easy Beauty. As Jones argues, leaning on the philosopher Iris Murdoch: “Beauty could help us improve the quality of our consciousness by briefly helping us ‘unself’, gifting us a break from our ‘fat, relentless, ego’,” a reprieve from our expectations of what “good” and “bad” should be, from our hierarchies of art. To experience what the art critic Sebastian Smee calls an “animal immersion in the world”.

In some sense, then, beauty is the opposite of knowledge. While knowledge makes us feel bigger, reaching out into the world, beauty makes the world feel bigger, towering over us.

If beauty helps us unself, then ugliness, like knowledge, furiously selves us in the world, making us totally aware of its grotesque shape, its gnarly wings, its spotted sight. Ugliness can remind us of the world we live in. This desire to plonk you in the muck of the era can be used for political ends; a filmmaker like Mrinal Sen, for example, would consciously make his films ugly, to suffocate us in the world we barely thrive in.

Ugliness can never be escapist, but its capacity to “self” us is also not inherently political or subversive. Balenciaga’s attempts are a sham we have propped up through blind discourse; it would not be the first, nor the last, to make us want to take a hammer, nay, a cleaver to what passes for contemporary art today. So, then, is the Labubu, working overtime to turn disgust into envy, until the bridge between the two words collapses and their foreheads touch.

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This idea of mimetic desire has always existed, wanting things only because others want it, and desire has never been well-behaved, but the ownership of something that is consciously ugly to consciously signal class is a sign that perhaps the power that beauty as a virtue held has now been dimmed, or at best, complicated.

The Ambani wedding’s ugliness, though, that is carpet-bombing our discourse inaugurates a totally new era of the ugly. It is one that does not even demand a reaction. The comments section to the posts are all shut. The power to wield these gaudy images over our heads is enough. This is an ugliness that merely demands it be stated, an arrogance to exist, producing a numbed anti-reaction that flies against the demands we make of the world: to feel, to be moved, to respond. This new, mutilated world asks from us nothing more than our eyes—deadened and forsaken. 

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.