Art In Theory: Victor Hugo on the Grotesque

"The distinguishing character of modern culture, he argues, is its preoccupation with the grotesque, by which he means the comic, the eccentric, the anomalous, the monsterous, the vernacular-everything i fact, that the classical is not"-45

The modern muse: "It will acknowledge that not everything in creation is beautiful to the human eye, that the ugly co-exist side by side with the beautiful, the deformed beside the gracious, the grotesque beside the sublime. good hand in hand with evil, and shadow with light"

wonder: whether nature mutiliated will be more beautiful than nature portrayed whole, whether art has the right to misrepresent man, life, and creations