Against pleasure: the art that bores us

The traditional concept of art is closely related to beauty and also to aesthetic pleasure. However, the emergence of avant‐garde and contemporary art has subverted that imagination. Art no longer seems to be pleasant, but it can also be disgusting and tedious, just like contemporary art that has often been criticized as such. From this point of view, this article attempts to look at the reasons why some art bores its viewers. From the epistemological perspective, we start to examine the philosophical thoughts of Plato and Kant on art, and the critique of Marxist ideology and aesthetics, exploring different perspectives on aesthetic beauty and pleasure. Furthermore, through the aesthetics of ugliness studied by Rosenkranz, of which opens the space for the discourse of negative beauty, we start our deduction of boredom in art. We discover that boredom generated by art does not have an absolute link with beauty and ugliness, but rather it has to do with the subjectivity of the viewers. With the examination of boredom from the perspective of the structure, content, time, mechanical production, and interpretation of the work, we have found that in addition to the characteristics of the work itself, the production of boredom is related to the educational and cultural background of the spectator, as well as to one´s personal taste. Finally, we also question whether art has begun to be boring and unremarkable after the historical progress of art being suspended, owing to “the end of art” suggested by Danto.