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SUJET n°2

Le sujet porte sur la thématique « Arts et débats d'idées » Axe d'étude n°2 « L'art qui fait débat »

Partie I (16 points) : prenez connaissance des documents A, B et C et traitez le sujet suivant en anglais.
Write a short commentary on the three documents (about 500 words) : taking into account their
specificities, analyse how the artists perceive art and beauty in the three documents.

Partie II (4 pts) : traduisez en français le passage souligné tiré du document B.

Document A
The Beauty of Ugly Painting

Lost in the fun house of Laura Owens's unstoppably inventive show at the gallery Sadie Coles HQ in
London last year, I spent a whole afternoon eyeballing a painting of Garfield. The L.A.-based Owens transforms
elements that could be too swiftly called ‘‘zany’’ or ‘‘lurid’’ (…) into some thing ravishing. In a 2013 interview, the artist
– Laura Owens – said she had no intention of making ‘‘good’’ art (…) Owens, who will be the subject of a
midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art this fall, is a master of what might be
called ‘‘ugly painting.’’ As paradoxical as this sounds, the term is in fact ferocious praise. Ugly art is sloppy, wild
and, yes, transgressive, exciting confusion and joy because it abandons commonplace ideas of what is
— and looks — pretty. This is not a question of being merely grotesque, but daring. It’s a philosophy that harks back to Tristan
Tzara, Dada’s chief theorist, who in 1918 trashed beauty as ‘‘a boring sort of perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp.’’
The Dadaists were advocates for ugliness as not just a valid artistic condition, but as a way of shocking a
public reeling in the midst of a hideous war. (…)
But what unifies ugly painting is its defiance of the obviously attractive, familiar or ‘‘lifelike.’’ It serves as a reminder
that art isn’t a branch of mortuary science, providing faithful replication of lost beauties. It’s a mind-altering
drug : It exists to cause trouble, knock things head over heels and show that there are other ways to see. (…)
Ugly painting — even expensive ugly painting — defies a bloated art market, in which inoffensive works all too
often become trophies. Ugliness is also a way of responding to the difficulty of being a painter now (…).
And so many painters right now have become good at being ugly. The heartbreaking works of Karen
Kilimnik recast the icons of consumerism and popular culture - from Kate Moss to drowsy dogs — as strangely
deformed things : For a show last year at New York’s Gallery, she stuck cat stickers onto reproductions of baroque tapestries.
Torey Thornton’s paintings turn contextless objects — a roll of toilet paper, a lopsided pineapple, an egg — into
disembodied abstractions, placing each in a scene that suggests a computer simulation of surrealism.

By Charlie Fox, “The Beauty of Ugly Art”, The New York Times Style Magazine, Sept 4th 2017

https://www.nytimes.com /2017/09/04/t-magazine/art/ugly-painting-laura-owens–karen-kilimnik-sam-mckinnis.html
Document B
The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he
who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The
highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is
hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or
an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth-century dislike of
realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect
use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No
artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No
artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view
of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the
actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do
so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, vital. When critics disagree the
artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
By Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

Document C

By Willem de Kooning, Woman IV , oil, enamel, charcoal on canvas, 1.7 m x 1.24 m, 1953.