ABSTRACT
How do individuals and communities respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples with which aestheticians have grappled in recent decades. The aversive and visceral nature of disgust has generated particular interest. But as Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics, there is also a paradoxical attraction to that which arouses disgust. Following Kant and Korsmeyer from the Western philosophical tradition, I claim that the aversive-attractive response is integral to disgust’s power to motivate aesthetic engagement. On the one hand, people might feel its force and refuse to engage with that which disgusts. On the other hand, unshakeable interest may spur active responses including the exchange of judgments of taste; protests of a given artist, work, or exhibition; or even violent actions intended to damage or destroy a particular work. While the negative dimension of disgust response is often regarded as a liability from an aesthetic standpoint, I argue that disgust has a corresponding productive dimension that has important implications for communities. In this chapter, I coin the term “generative disgust” in order to explain the productive capacity of disgust to inspire extreme communal, often subcultural, activity. On my view, generative disgust has two orientations - destructive and constructive - that indicate the group’s comportment towards a particular work of art or artist that also galvanize the community in question. I explore two examples that reveal the dual character of generative disgust in communities: Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) (destructive deployment) and Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (constructive deployment).
