Art: Why Is It So Ugly?

I read this article - "Sleeping Beauty," by Laurie Fendrich - hoping it would deliver on its promise to show how

Modern ideas in philosophy and science that had nothing to do with art—that were outside of it, and unconcerned with it—have been more powerful in weakening the power of beauty in art than anything that ever happened within art itself. By dragging beauty from its original lofty connection to a transcendent world and placing it squarely on the ground, next to all the other qualities of all the goods of the material world, modern philosophy and science cultivated a new kind of viewer. In particular, the philosophical collapse of belief in natural law—which is the idea that principles to morality exist outside of manmade conventions, and that reason can discover them—inadvertently, by sheer accident, took down beauty with it.

She doesn't quite accomplish this goal - and some of the essay is a frustrating mishmash of art criticism, bad intellectual history, and pop philosophy - but Fendrich does have some provoking things to say to anyone who happens to like art as ugly as, say, a John Currin painting or one of Matthew Barney's Cremaster films. Not counting Scarlett Johansson, just what is beauty?