ABSTRACT
At the end of the nineteenth century, aesthetics was caught up in the attempt to delineate the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, pain and pleasure. Of course, it is largely because these boundaries were blurred that the art and literature of that period are so interesting. The incorporation of ugliness into fin-de-siècle art and literature, like the overlaps between beauty and ugliness, is an essential sign of modernity. In this chapter, I want first to show that the idea of “The Modern” in High Art is the place where artistic refinement, “the primitive,” and nervous pathology meet. All three notions play an important role in evolutionary aesthetics. Part II will demonstrate that the idea of the modern in popular spectacle is also a convergence of the primitive and of nervous pathology, and – like High Art – it is also underlain with evolutionary aesthetics.
