The dialectic of ugliness in Dadaism and its aesthetic and technical manifestations in the light of cultural criticism

Abstract

The ugliness and beauty of its concepts and means and the liberation of its contemporary forms differed from the ugliness and beauty of pre-modernity in its concepts, its aesthetic taste, and its samples, as there became controversy based on the idea of the work, the type of materials used and the artist's style in the work. Accordingly, the concepts of beauty differed in different philosophers and thinkers in terms of their different philosophical approaches and aesthetic theories, and in different schools and artistic currents and their artists, such as Dadaism, which adopted a style different from the usual by focusing on alienation and free play and focusing on the daily event and political and social activity by raising astonishment for the recipient by using different techniques, materials, and methods of display and installation, i.e. showing the hidden and the implicit and not focusing on the aesthetic only. This is what cultural criticism came to by revealing ideologies and cognitive, intellectual, cultural, social, and historical influences. The problem of the current research was the following questions: Does ugliness have an aesthetic value in the Dada movement? What is the dialectic of ugliness in Dadaism, and does it have aesthetic and technical manifestations in the light of cultural criticism? The research relied on the analytical descriptive research method to achieve the research objectives, and the theoretical framework contained three axes, the first: the dialectic of ugliness and beauty, the second: the Dada movement and its intellectual and aesthetic premises, and the third: cultural criticism. The research community reached (6) works of art, by (two samples) for analysis, they were chosen randomly, the works of world artists in the Dada movement for the period (2010-2020), the most important findings of the two researchers: 1: Dada shocked the recipient by focusing on disgust and provocation and showing distorted characters in the artwork to highlight the ugliness, as in sample (1). 2: Some practices of cultural criticism in Dada depend on examining marginalized and erroneous intellectual models, clear and unclear to society, because they deal with the traditional error that is common and accepted by society, to try to alert and expose the subtleties by highlighting them and exaggerating their portrayal, as in the sample models (2, 1).