What famous pieces of art do you find ugly, that most people love?

I’ve never cared for Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”:https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61OcpnZwRpL.SL500_AC_SS350.jpg

Not a fan of Donatello’s sculptures, but I do appreciate his paintings.

Pretty much anything by Warhol.such as this crap with Jagger as his theme.

Picasso’s Guernica

I do not much care for the Mona Lisa.

I think the Mona Lisa is quite an ugly painting. The colors are drab to my mind and the woman quite unfortunate looking. I’m also not fond of a lot of Salvador Dali’s paintings due to the subject matter however his play on texture is fascinating. As well as Warhol I found his art to be very kitsch but I think it was supposed to be.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night

The Scream. Dont recall who did it but he must have been on some heavy drugs.

The Scream is by Edvard Munch. I adore it.

For me, Jackson Pollack paintings are some obscene joke no one admits to understanding.

I saw The Sunflowers at a museum in Amsterdam, and my 20 year old self was almost physically overwhelmed by the stunning vibrancy.

There are some Italian Futurists that leave me cold, not appealing or interesting to me at all.

But there seems to be some thought in this thread that art should be some kind of pleasing eye candy, that the best would show beauty to someone with newly given sight.

Art is not necessarily pretty, the best art challlenges the viewer’s understanding and emotions.

Body piercings.
Some popular modern design and fashion.

Other than that, I’m not coming up with any examples that fit the question. It seems like an oddly-worded question, to which it seems like it must be mentioned that probably no serious artwork’s first goal is to be “pretty” or even “not ugly”. (Generally the goal of most art is to make some sort of impression, to evoke a response or affect the viewer, to express something, or to induce new conversations, etc.)

I appreciate or at least respect in some way most art, though I am much more interested in some styles than others. Some art I do “find ugly” but I doubt many would say “most people love” the ones I find ugly.

Mona Lisa.

I’m not much of a fan of Picasso, basically because of a single exhibit I went to see. It may have been just a quirk of what pieces happened to be there and how they lined up together, but there were just so many pictures and statues of women who, even with the cubist distortion of everything else, had perfectly spherical boobs. It just left me with an unsavory taste in my mouth. Felt a bit like objectification, felt a bit like “when you boil the female form down, it’s about these two things here,” than it did anything else… But I guess from that, I learned that I prefer portraits where I feel like I get a sense of the person being portrayed, rather than be reminded that I’m seeing that person through the eyes and craft of another… And those pieces of art didn’t let me forget there was a person behind their creation. Which I guess means I still got something from the art. Though I have to admit, I didn’t look into Picasso further after the visit. I just held onto my almost entirely uninformed initial impression.

I’ve actually always liked Van Gogh paintings. I didn’t know why, I just did. I found out somewhat recently that when I was two, I went to a museum with Van Gogh paintings. I was flitting from painting to painting, only giving each a second or two of attention, and then would just stand transfixed in front of the Van Goghs and stare and stare and stare at them. I guess I’ve carried that experience and that impression with me all these years!

@Soubresaut want to see some botched boob jobs done by Michelangelo, including one from the Sistine Chapel?
Scroll about half way down the page, it is right after the examples of his use of bodybuilders for his women models.

Haha, thank you for that! I had no idea… or even any idea that he used body builders as models! (Though I did wonder why everyone in his paintings was always so muscular…! Was that a thing that people did then?) It’s also fascinating to realize that as absolutely skilled he was, he didn’t apparently had some holes in his artistic knowledge of anatomy.

@Soubresaut I suggest you open yourself to the possibility that other Picasso works might be pleasant and interesting to you.

Picasso was rather prolific, so there are occasional exhibits of a vast amount of similar works that are actually just a small subset of his stuff. It was his way of working through whatever he was trying to portray. The exhibit you saw may have been focused on a period in his life when he was trying to figure out spherical boobs.

But he certainly did not portray women in that way throughout his career.

@zenvelo thanks for the input. I think I probably will. (And I think you are correct about the exhibit, in that if I recall correctly, the exhibit was showing a collection of his work in a particular period/time.)

@Soubresaut We were in Amsterdam in March and toured the Van Gogh art museum. It is laid out well, providing context that built upon the story of his life and leading up to his art work. I found it fascinating which led to a greater appreciation of his style, including Sunflowers.

This is not to say that you would feel the same way. There would not be a lessoning of respect for anyone who felt differently. Appreciation of a work of art is such a personal opinion that it shouldn’t impact any judgement of another person.