Does art have to be beautiful?

The following was posted by Final Identity under the Photographers Don't post, and deserves a post of its own.
I've always insisted myself that beauty is essential to art. With the understanding that "beauty" is not the same as "pretty" or "pleasant" or "palatable".

F.I.:
Art begs for a response, or an interaction, or a perception from another person. It can even be "easy" because it didn't take effort at the moment of creation, but that ease was the product of a lifetime of preparation on the part of the creator, whose entire essence and collected world view somehow got translated into the work. Or the effort of creation itself can be "the work" part.

An artist simply trains himself in these various communications and then tries to use them to his purpopses.

I recall a class in "Western Values" or some such, a freshman-level college thing where we all got our first chance to talk about deep philosophical ideas. We did some Sophocles, some Anouilh, a little Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ya know, old chestnuts.

One question arose. Does an artist have to create something that's beautiful? Plenty of students in our seminar, wise to their newfound politicizations, suggested no, he doesn't. He could create an ugly hideous thing, but the response in the viewer might be the intent of the art. Picasso's "Guernica" for example -- a scene of destruction, with the composition itself destroyed. "Mr. Picasso," asked the disgruntled General, who had wanted the glories of his regime idolized instead of battered, "did you paint that picture?" "No, Mr. General. You did," so responded Pablo.

But I insisted that artists must work toward beauty. Or use some other word -- toward wholeness, or toward sanity, or toward just plain old organic compositional togetherness. I think Picasso would be the first to say that the overwhelming response to "Guernica" was in itself a "beauty" of a sort.

Most of my classmates just thought I was a philistine, wishing for pretty pastel reproductions of impressionist water lilies. After all, who insists on something as bourgeois as "beauty" when so much more deep, philosophical, political concepts are available to the artist -- the struggling worker, the horrors of war, the destruction of the environment, plays about dysfunctional families. These are ART because they're DEEP, so thought the class. This fellow seeking beauty? He doesn't GET that art can be UNSETTLING. And it OUGHT to be. So they thought. It ought to "challenge assumptions."

No. I think "Animal Farm" is quite beautiful. Who doesn't see the beauty in "some are just more equal than others"? What a turn on a turn. Orwell would agree. "Guernica" has an incredible organic wholeness to its composition, line and form in place, colors in unity. Even "Morder Hoffnung des Frauens," a weird experimental theater piece from the Jugendstil period in Vienna about ... ya know ... nothing much, except Angst -- even that has a beauty to it. They missed my intent. Most of them are just lawyers and business executives now. I guess their fervent politicization didn't help them challenge their assumptions much at all.