Since the beginning of the 20th century, the notion beauty has been an object of mockery to the effect of receding or even disappearing completely from aesthetic discussions. Being a branch of philosophy, classical aesthetics was a philosophy of beauty. However, recent aestheticians not so much dwell on the theme of beauty as devote their efforts to an analysis of art and a phenomenology of aesthetic experiences. In nowaday aesthetics, beauty is not a universal, transcendental value (as it was together with truth and good), but merely one of many other values. The idea in the modern Western aesthetics about the identity between beauty and art is not a matter of course anymore in the contemporary aesthetics, as it did not exist in ancient and medieval aesthetic thoughts. Furthermore, contemporary art puts ugliness at the center stage as the protagonist. The question is, then, how ugliness can become the subject of aesthetics in the contemporary art that has banished beauty. To address the issue, this paper introduces and examines two contemporary aesthetic positions: one, Hans Sedlmayr’s thinking about the contemporary Western art in terms of Kunst, Anti-Kunst and Nicht-Kunst; the other, Nishimura Kiyokazu’s thinking in terms of aesthetics, anti-aesthetics and non-aesthetics. While the former takes a negative stance on Anti-Kunst and Nicht-Kunst, the latter takes a bit tolerant stance in that, while being affirmative of anti-aesthetics, he is against non-aesthetics.