Ugly Beautiful

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, in conversation with Dirt contributor and essayist Katy Kelleher.

In Ode to a Grecian Urn, the English poet John Keats famously and vaguely proclaims, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The line is an allusion, according to some scholars, to classical notions of beauty held by the ancient Greeks. True beauty, by this logic, exhibits an objective essence. It’s a quality that is unmistakable, daunting, and pure. For Keats, truth might’ve felt intricately linked to beauty, a sentiment, no doubt, inspired by 19th century England’s vast, bucolic landscapes, but in 21st century America, every beautiful mass-produced object carries an unsavory past, a premise explored in Katy Kelleher’s essay collection, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things.

“Understanding beauty begets beauty,” Kelleher writes in the book’s introduction. We desire beauty in our life experiences and objects; we are disturbed by the ugly and avoid the abject. But much like the relationship between life and death, Kelleher positions ugliness as beauty’s natural counterpart. They are two sides of the same coin. It’s a point that feels especially urgent today, given how the average American consumer shops in a bubble, divorced from the reality of how things are made. To better appreciate the aesthetically pleasurable, we must be privy to the unpleasant truth of its history. Kelleher investigates, among many objects, perfume (a topic she ingeniously covers for Dirt), makeup, silk, gemstones, mirrors, and flowers, diving into their cultural histories with a curious memoirist’s eye.

Kelleher and I spoke in February about her book, which is out today. Our conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Terry Nguyen: The editors at n+1 recently published an essay asking, “Why is everything so ugly?” I’ve noticed discourse, too, on how capitalism and postmodernism is flattening aesthetics. Our preferences, from architecture to facial features to “blanding,” seem increasingly homogenous as a result of the internet. Do you think this is true? And how or where should we look for beauty?

Katy Kelleher: I've been so interested in the argument that we're living in an uglier world. I remember this study about how we're living in a grayer world: There are more gray objects being produced, from cars to household objects. But when I’m offline and going about my life, I don't really experience that much flattening of beauty. It feels like something is happening on the internet with graphics and maybe AI could bring about this wave of... bland, boring design, but in my life off the computer, there is so much beauty all around me.

My favorite places to go are gardens. That and greenhouses. I love landscape design. It’s fascinating to see how people manipulate nature to produce something that's both natural and incredibly human. You look at a certain plant and it's right there. The beauty is so obvious and undeniable. And the beach!

In Portland, Maine—where I live—there's some decor that's very Airspace-y with the exposed brick and rustic tables. There are some cheesy millennial chic design spaces, but you can also go into a cool used bookstore and it feels incredible. Right now, we are producing a lot of ugly stuff, but that doesn't mean all the other stuff is gone. I have so many used books in my room. There are so many eras of design being represented. Maybe the books right now we're seeing have that Corporate Memphis look, but what about vintage goods? I'm not totally convinced the ugly discourse is true.

TN: Physical beauty feels like such a loaded ideal as of late, what with the talk of beauty/body trends. Now there’s Ozempic. Did you feel like the discourse on beauty was changing, even during the time you were writing the book?

KK: When I was writing the book, I was thinking about makeup and Instagram Face. That already feels passé. My stance in the book is that the truly feminist thing to do is to not hop on every beauty bandwagon by getting all the fillers and Botox. The more rich people play with beauty, it becomes a trend and pressures everybody to partake in it. I don't know if there's a feminist way to commit to playing the beauty game. These notions of beauty become warped by the time it trickles down to the masses.

I want to be clear that everyone deserves to feel good in their body. No one deserves to be treated like their physical form is repugnant or less-than. We also have to recognize that physical beauty is not something everyone will have. But it's not something that is essential to living. Some people are going to be more beautiful than others. We need to stop putting so much cultural meaning into physical beauty. We should accept that we will age. There will be periods in life when you will feel more beautiful than others. It becomes horrifically dangerous and grotesque if the pursuit of beauty is all that we care about.

TN: Beauty, in a very contemporary sense, can feel like a frivolous, feminized topic. It’s so philosophically ripe, though. How did you determine how to approach and frame beauty?

KK: Culturally, we elevate and prioritize experiences of beauty that are sublime in nature. It’s a very masculine instinct. There’s this book called Venus in Exile by Wendy Steiner on the rejection of beauty in 20th century art. She makes the argument that the relationship to beauty was taken over by male artists. They wanted to create a new sublime. When I was young, I gravitated to this notion of transcendental beauty in grand landscapes. My background is in art history, and I went to school in the Hudson Valley. There, you can see firsthand the great beautiful light, how it’s so clearly a symbol of God's beauty. It was almost spiritual. We're supposed to feel that awe and magnitude in the face of that Beauty.

But there are all these other things that are beautiful but not as grand, like human bodies and perfumes and scents. Even in the decorative arts, products are dismissed. Women's work is associated with products, but with male labor, they’re considered works of art. When you think about high fashion dresses or some of the textiles made by hand communities around the world, there's so much labor that goes into beauty.

TN: Your goal with the book was to reveal the ugly or dark underbelly of things we consider beautiful. It's something that's increasingly necessary as consumers are divorced from the supply chain and the labor behind mass-produced goods. What most surprised you in your investigations?

KK: When I was researching this book, I knew there were aspects of labor and production that would scare me and make me feel horrible. I was surprised at how often thinking about it as a consumer was avoidable. It wasn't so much that we oppress people to produce our goods for cheap. Sometimes, it’s just a part of the process of making a beautiful object. With the marble chapter, I read about how stonecutters work with engineered stone. The silicon gets in their lungs, which can produce lung cancer and eventually kill them. This kind of thing is so avoidable. If you spray the stone down with water and wear proper gear, if these safety measures are implemented, these hazards can be prevented. This is happening not just abroad, but in the US, in Colorado.

I happened to find out that one of my best friends' very close friends does luxury stone cutting. His name is Joey. I spoke with him about his work and the safety precautions at a party. Joey said he doesn't like to wear that safety gear. He just didn’t want to.

TN: This goes back to something you wrote: "Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay." So much of online aesthetics disguises or sanitizes facts or images or truths that are ugly and/or bad. What role does the ugly — from a moral and an aesthetic sense — have in our lives?

KK: I am very attached to a certain kind of ugliness. Decay is one. I'm attached to the way things die, the impermanence of things. It's been helpful in times of grief for me. It's just how life unfolds. In order to participate in life on earth, we have to let things age and decay. We have to let things go and allow for the process of recycling to happen. There's an element of ugliness that is oddly comforting.

I wrote once about the dead animals on my property when I was pregnant. I would keep finding these dead animals my dog would kill. I don't know what happened to them. What's uglier than a corpse of a deer? It made me feel very alive to come across something like that. It made me more appreciative of what was going on in my uterus, and it made me excited about life. It makes beauty more apparent.

There’s moral ugliness, too. I'm a bit of a rubbernecker, and I wish I wasn't so attached to listening to true crime podcasts, for example. It's this hideous thing that we’re so curious about. We feel it might protect us or make us feel more alive. I've been a bit repulsed by my morbid curiosities, but they feel useful. In regards to what we’re consuming: I think sacrifice is necessary and important. You're not supposed to have all the beautiful things in the world.

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