The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Ibibio Dramatic Arts

Extract

Aesthetics is certainly not an easy concept to define or explain. The numerous problems often associated with identifying the aesthetic in terms of the properties of its particular objects, arts and culture, largely account for this difficulty. And so relative, open-ended and complex is aesthetics that philosophers, scholars and aestheticians, since Plato's time, are still far from reaching a definitive consensus about its properties, application and meaning. In its general application to the arts, the inherent criterial problems of aesthetics appear to be heightened and made even more complex by the fact that some works of art, like sculpture, consist of physical objects; others, like poetry and music, consist of verbal and gestural behavior and imagined and non-physical objects, even though poetry and music can at times consist of physical objects; and others still, like dance and drama, consist of kinesis and a variable combination of some or all of the other properties.

Generally, it should be correct to say that aesthetics is an articulated value concept, a relative and qualitative experience that is diffused throughout nature and the arts, and throughout human experience and behavior, even though the congeries of its qualities and coordinates are often irreducible in language and analysis. Aesthetics can, therefore, apply to the “theories about the nature of art as well as about the criteria of aesthetic judgement” (Wolff 1983, 27). This argument by Janet Wolff is based on the inherent relationship between an art concept and its corresponding aesthetic theory on the one hand, and on the relationship between a preferred or “adopted” aesthetic theory and the corresponding criteria for its application and analysis: