Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 45 No. 3, 2025.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21464/fi45302
Aesthetics of Ugliness – Sound and Image of Extreme Metal Music
Bojana Radovanović Šuput
orcid.org/0000-0002-6454-8513
; Muzikološki institut SANU, Kneza Mihaila 36/IV, RS–11000 Beograd
Abstract
Throughout the history of Western art, the concept of ugly has mostly been defined in relation to beauty. Against the beautiful, sublime, useful, correct, moral, stood the ugly, wrong, monstrous, disgusting and immoral. In the mid-19th century, the aesthetics of the ugly finally received a central place in the study process, in the seminal study Aesthetics of Ugliness by Karl Rosenkranz (1853). Following this, and especially with the turn of the 20th century, the concept of ugly began to feature more prominently in mainstream art, as well as in philosophical i.e. aesthetic thought. The topic of this article is the research of the concept and aesthetics of ugly in a contemporary musical form of extreme metal music, the global phenomenon that emerged in the eighties of the 20th century and continues to develop until today. The paper aims to examine how ugliness has materialized, has been shaped, and been perceived in extreme metal music, which is reputed to be the most radical set of metal subgenres in the discursive, visual and sonic sense.
Keywords
aesthetics of ugliness; extreme; metal music; Kart Rosenkranz; monstrous; aesthetics of music
Hrčak ID:
340411
URI
Publication date:
14.12.2025.
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