Is there any art that is truly ugly or aesthetically displeasing?

As an art major I have seen my fair share of art, whether it be a famous painting out of an art history book or museum, or a drawing one of my classmates did in class. However, to answer my question above I do believe there are some ugly pieces in art, but only if the artist did not put any effort into their piece. For example, if the artist did not put forth the effort into their piece, I would call it an unsuccessful piece of art. But, there are also artist that do pieces that are very simplistic and look as if they didn’t try, but they probably thought long and hard about their choice of composition, subject matter, colors, the list goes on. Otherwise, if one believes that the piece is displeasing to the eye, I would recommend looking at the bigger picture and actually finding out more about the artist, their inspiration, and their goal for that specific piece. After looking into all that information you may look differently about that piece of art. I actually had a lecture today in my color theory class about the exact same thing I am telling all of you.

For this blog post I decided to look up “aesthetically pleasing paintings” on google and if you do the same your initial reaction will be very similar to what mine was. My reaction was that 1) On the whole first page, I did not witness any of the paintings we discussed in previous lectures. 2) Literally all of the pieces that were shown on google were nowhere near similar! This means that the perspective of aesthetics is completely personal and all the more confusing to figure out. So really there is no right way and wrong way to perceive art. If it is aesthetically beautiful to one person, it might be seen as “junk” to another. However, before actually clarifying it as junk, I ask you to at least do your research before giving any piece of artwork that title!