Ugliness and Judgment by Hyde Timothy;

Author:Hyde, Timothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

Through the decades-long course of Soane’s several encounters with aesthetic commentary, the judgment of ugliness enacted a precipitating role rather than a concluding one. His career included successes and failures, and no one of the critical judgments had a fatal repercussion, but they precipitated a sequence of differentiations and identifications bringing the aesthetic register into new relations with circumstances outside of architecture. By prompting what was ultimately a detour through the institutions of the court and through the changing mechanisms of libel law, the judgment of ugliness led to the distinction or separation of aesthetic criticism, to its depersonalization, in a direct sense, and therefore allowed for its layering onto other planes of social transaction, such as the professional or the political. A judgment of beauty, of course, would not have prompted any such recourse to law or seeking of remedy; it was the serial assessments of dullness, distaste, disproportion that pressed the aesthetic toward the legal and thence toward the social. Soane’s scrap-books of newspaper clippings give palpable evidence of his concern for, and his attempt to bring to bear some personal control over, the public sphere made concrete in the ever-accumulating pages of newspapers and journals. The scrapbooks document his broad curiosity in diverse subjects and events, from the Napoleonic Wars to experiments in electricity, and throughout his attention to the cultivation of reputation is clearly evident. Among the clippings can be found dozens of reports of sundry types of libel trials—from defenses of professional competence to defenses of women’s honor—that clearly suggest a more than abiding interest. (Figure 45)

Figure 45. Newspaper report of a case for the prosecution of a libel against the memory of the late Caroline Lady Wrottesley, one of many reports on libel cases preserved by Soane in his scrapbook of newspaper clippings.

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