11 Ways How to Make Something Ugly On Purpose | Beyond Taste & Class

you're not an aesthetic Pinterest moodboard | Francis Bacon's scary pope, Pierre Bourdieu's distinction critique & a mini-list to get down n dirty with your inner ugly weirdo 💙

Artwork by Mariam Chagelishvili

A short while back K & I were in New York with Ana for the Poetry Festival, but we also got to spend time walking around the city & delighting in way better food than Blacksburg & also, I’d say, a lot more art.

One of our cultured la-di-da pitstops was MoMA. Of course we saw a shit ton of brilliant (& also “umm whaaaa”) art in there, but one painting really struck me. & that was this Francis Bacon piece:

Study for Portrait VII, 1953

I stood in front of it for maybe seven full minutes, which in museum time (& with a 4 year old in tow!) is practically a pilgrimage. The room was buzzing & moving & still this thing felt like silence. Not peace, per say…but more like being swallowed up whole in a single gulp.

There’s something about this screaming, shining, dark pope dude that makes me feel like I’ve walked in on a private harrowing moment.

The lines are rigid & gold, almost architectural, but the body inside them is soft & breaking. It’s hard to explain why it hit so hard, except to say: this painting was ugly. & it was better than so much stuff in there Better because it was memorable…because it was weird as fuck, & entirely it’s own.

Bob Hicok, K & my poetry mentor, encourages us to be a “country of one” when it comes to our writing. He doesn’t mean that we should be isolated loners, no…he urges us to stay true to our vision of what we want from our art, to keep our own inner intuitions active above all else, & never think that we need to emulate another.

This leads me think of Bourdieu unpacking how taste is never just about aesthetics. It’s about class. Capital. Power. Because the things we’re taught to see as “beautiful” often reflect the values of the people who decide what’s worth being seen as “beautiful” in the first place. You might think you just like certain colors, certain styles, certain books…but most of us are echoing an almost sociobiological ingrainment (not a real word but in the words of the Mighty Thor, “all words are made up”) wrought by a largely colonized-colonizer civilization for centuries.

Bourdieu writes¹:

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.

What if, instead of anxiously curating our taste to signal cultural sophistication, we deliberately chose ugliness?

What if, instead of always stopping ourselves in the midst of the magical gift that is making any kind of art with our own hands & hearts & minds just because we don’t think it’s “good enough” or “will it fit the trends” or “can I even get this out there”…we just…finished that damn ugly, perfect thing?

Bourdieu's research showed that the French bourgeoisie leaned toward abstract art & Bach, while working-class folks were more into Renoir & popular music. Each group's preferences served as invisible badges of belonging…a kind of unspoken code: this is what people like us admire.

But there’s something weirdly liberating about refusing to signal anything at all. Neither while experiencing art, & definitely never when creating it.

Dear friends, furrow up all the high & low eyebrows alike.

Seriously…go head… actively choose to make something ugly. Loud. Lopsided. Unrefined. Outside the confinements of social acceptance. Don’t worry about society. Think instead about the small personal real community that you have around you, even if that’s just your partner or your best friend or your mom or 10 amazing people or 20, or however many.

When you do that on purpose…when you fail taste on purpose…you step out of the whole rigged game of it all. You stop trying to earn approval through an alien version of aestheticization that, in the end, is just bubbles & dust blown around by an ephemeral wind.

That is the freest place to work from. That is you being a country of one.

Say “fuck right off” to that creeping exhaustion that comes from making things while trying to be seen at the same time or right afterwards. Because the moment you start thinking about how it will land, you’re no longer within the work. You’re hovering above it, like a annoying gnat. Swat that part of you away, splat it against the wall of your inner mind, die & phoenix outwards back to your real, raw, misshapen, weird authentic self!

Alright, this kick-in-the-pants quasi-monologue is mostly for me, obviously, but I hope it’s reached out to some of you also. Tell me, what are the ugly-awesome things you’re working on?

& also… if you need a bit more stirrin’, here’s a little list (b/c I’m sure by now you know I love my lists)

1. Begin before the concept is clean…before the idea knows what it wants to be. Start while it’s still soft & loud & slippery, & resist the urge to tame it too soon.

2. Make something that would be rejected by every magazine/publisher/whoever you admire & still call it finished.

3. Let it echo something true that you haven’t found words for yet.

4. Trust the version of yourself who made the first draft, even if they were chaotic & sad & barely holding it together.

5. Let it be longer than it needs to be. Let it ramble a little, or end too soon.

6. Make something your past self would be embarrassed by, & your future self might not understand. Let it be too loud, too flat, too sentimental, too vague. Let it be yours.

7. Let your form fail you. Let genres blur. Let the structure fall apart & see what shape remains.

8. Use the color that gives you a headache. The word you swore you’d never use again. Let your old habits sneak in through the back door.

9. Write until the work is a little embarrassing…a little hard to explain…a little bit like standing in a room naked under neon lighting.

10. Don’t worry about elegance…or clarity…or how someone might summarize it in a sentence someday.

11. Stop (proverbially or otherwise) looking over your shoulder mid-line. There’s no one there. Just you & this fantastic gift, ya little lord.

1. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Paris: Routledge, Keagan, and Paul.