No, It Is Not In The Eye

The capability to percieve and understand art is primarlly a matter of education. The concept of beauty is a matter of conditioning.

 

What if it's not bias? What if it's a function of revealed mathematical truths, as was the case in the Judith Langlois study (the one that showed a face with particular proportions to people cross-culturally and saw it found beautiful by everyone involved)?

Some modern art is OK. I was with a magnificent artist named Julia, and while she could do modern art well enough she preferred classical sensibilities. When I took her to a avant garde poetry reading in DC, she told me, "I hope you never write this way." I do not.

 

Yeah, he is one of my favorite geniuses, the other ones being Keats, Blake and Tesla.
I went to Barcelona with my girlfriend, and she was able to find things to photograph there that were absolutely gorgeous.

 

Nikola Tesla is my hero. As you can probably tell from my picture. My only real gripe with Barcelona was the construction going on at Park Guell and Sagrada Familia. Of course this cannot be helped but my mind wanders to imagine what it will be like once completed. Oh well, I guess I'll have to go back, what a shame.

 

Apparently the Sagrada Familia has been finished. I know nothing about Park Guell.

 

No, I went in June and it's expected to be finished in 2026, 100 years after the death of Antoni Gaudi. Park Guell is a beautiful little area that is filled with colourful mosaics and buildings.

 

How do you conclude that that was the case in Langlois' study? Their observations seem to me completely consistent with a bias which is present in all humans (seeing how they, to the best of my knowledge, only asked humans). From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense for humans to develop a sense of beauty, it allows us to avoid diseases and rewards finding patterns which is useful for our ability to solve problems.

As with many kinds of art, you get better at appreciating art that you have come across in the past. Metal heads will get more out of a metal album than would a cultural hippie. Now, I don't think I know of anyone who has a broad enough taste that they enjoy the intricacies of every type of art, so I don't have a problem with people disliking certain kinds of art, but to be unable to understand that others might like other things than oneself seems a little self-absorbed.

 

In the Langlois study, a face with a particular set of proportions was shown to people cross-culturally. All found it beautiful.

I certainly understand that others might like other things than myself.

 

Beauty is entirely subjective. It is a personal determination. There can be widespread agreement amongst people of a particular thing/person being beautiful, but to the individual is its entirely self determined, cultural conditioning notwithstanding.
Not to mention that notions of beauty have changed from generation to generation and time to time.

 

When you say all, you mean all humans right? Humans may be diverse, but we have a lot of stuff in common. If beauty is, as I suggest, a subjective thing, and we have evolutionarily learned to identify it to avoid disease, malice, complacency and many other things, then that is consistent with Langlois' results, but your conclusion would still be wrong. The Langlois study does not (on its own) support your conclusion.

Then how do you tell failure to attain beauty from simply not liking the same things? Do you reject modern art because it's bad or because you don't like it? Now, there is more to the story than that, but that's an angle which your argument fails to address, which makes the argument look sloppy and incomplete.

 

The conclusion I make is that there is both relative beauty and absolute beauty, the first taste-dependent, the second a function of mathematics. In the language of the universe that is mathematics we see expressed absolute beauty.

I don't reject all modern art. I like art that aims for things such as beauty and meaning. Some modern art does that, but most does not.

 

Do you think that in each culture they have their 'beautiful' which other cultures might not find 'beautiful'?

So if you are coming from a U.S perspective, what the U.S might consider beautiful might not be what Aboriginal Australians might find beautiful.

Want to know something amazing?

There was even a time when what Texans thought as beautiful were not what Californians thought to be beautiful...

There's only 2 things that come out of L.A. 'City slickers and Smog'.


That was then, though.. this is now.

 

Why do we see some animals as cute? Why do we see some things in nature as beautiful? There is no evolutionary reason for such things, so it must be something else.

Of course. 500 faces to 20000 participants.

I once took a magnificent visual artist named Julia to an avant garde poetry reading, and she told me, "I hope you never write that way." She herself has an absolute mastery of photography and painting. She could do modern art, but she preferred classical sensibilities and art dedicated to creation of beauty.

 

There is relative beauty, and there is absolute beauty. I have brought up two scientific experiments, one showing the existence of one and one showing the existence of the other. A face with particular set of proportions will be seen as beautiful cross-culturally. A face that showed 500 faces to 20000 participants got each face picked as the most beautiful at least once. The first argues for absolute beauty that transcends taste, which is expressed in language of the universe that is mathematics and validates the artistic search for truth in beauty. The second shows that there is someone for everyone, and that if you are not seen as beautiful while growing up does not mean that you are doomed to a life of loneliness. The correct claims on both sides are validated, while incorrect ones - on one side, that beauty is only taste-dependent, and on the other side, that unless you are seen as beautiful in your hometown you will never have a partner - are invalidated.

 

disagree, what is beautiful to one may not be to another.... thus the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

are there things of Beauty that most agree on, sure, but doesn't change the fact that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

 

Personally...I find it a bit ugly...but hey, that is just in my beholding eye.

 

How do you conclude that there is anything that falls into the absolute beauty category? I would be more inclined to think that there is, as you put it a "language of the universe which is mathematics", but that it is our human brains that translates that into beauty, in a fundamentally subjective (albeit common to most or all humans) way.

Of course, there is art that fails to do what it sets out to do (in modern as much as classical art). However, I reckon your interest in classical art and relative disinterest in modern art makes you judge modern art more harshly.

That's not exactly to say that all art is equal, I'm just saying your argument smacks more of a personal preference than an objective truth, and more to the point, your posts do nothing to address this suspicion.

 

It has been argued that we see animals as cute insofar that they have features which we evolutionarily should protect. Evolution tells us to protect babies, so it instills in us the will to bond with and favour things that sort of look like babies. Baby animals are unlikely to kill us, so there is no evolutionary pressure to be precise in our assessment. In fact, bringing up dogs and cats has turned out useful to humans. Small animals which do not resemble babies, like bugs, are not considered cute.

As you can see, your inability to identify evolutionary reasons does not mean that there are no evolutionary reasons.

I know, you keep repeating it, as if another anecdote of a person (whose sensibilities are presumably very close to yours) would resolve my complaint. This Julia person is presumably also human, so this story does nothing to support your argument that beauty exists outside of human observers.

 

What is 'beauty', but a consensus of humans agreeing that it is so? It is obviously in the eye of the beholder, and your argument is more of an agreement, or consensus, of what that means.

Does not the appreciation of 'beauty' reflect a spiritual, almost metaphysical quality? From a purely material perspective, there is only matter.. dead, meaningless, empty matter, with no way to attribute 'beauty', or 'not beauty' to any of it.

Pondering beauty is an exercise of the soul. It is not possible in an exclusively material universe.

 

This supposed modern art, called "Vault" in Melbourne (Australia) appeared in 1980 at the cost of something like 70,000 back then, we all renamed it the 'yellow peril', none like it, at all, and it was removed somewhere else, don't care, good riddance. What a silly waste of tax payers money!

 

Wow, I like it.

 

It has an appeal now, with all these modern colours and arty poles and stuff (especially on the way to Tullamarine airport), but back then, 1980, it was just too way ahead of it's time.
It was shifted somewhere else, haven't seen or hear about it since. Probably covered in graffiti, since Melbourne is graffiti capital of the whole of Oz!!