① Statements, like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder (观看者)”, are rarely questioned. They’ve become so embedded in our consciousness that people think it’s absurd to think otherwise. It might be useful, however, to at least push back on this assumption because people evaluate environment, situations, and people aesthetically. We may find that we still believe it is correct, but we may also find that there is a lot more to the situation than you suppose.
② A recent study exploring aesthetic taste was published in Cognition. The results from this study show that people agree very much in their aesthetic evaluation of natural objects, but they disagree more about artifacts, or human-made objects.
③ The study found that shared taste was most common for faces and natural landscapes, but least common among works of architecture and art. The hypothesis is the commonly pleasing features, like proportion or symmetry, are at work.
④ Preferences for natural scenes might be learned through life experiences. Factors like habitability, safety, and openness might be preferred as people develop. Some of the details of landscapes change, but the basics are more common, e.g., water, open spaces, and signs of care.
⑤ Art and architecture, unlike natural spaces, do not have the same level of exposure. So, people do not have the same level of shared taste.
⑥ It’s possible that the lower amount of agreement in the shared taste of artifacts has to do more with elements of style, rather than “behavioral consequences”.
⑦ All of the consequences seem reasonable (or at least possible), but I think there might be an interesting philosophical conclusion that they did not draw. It seems that there is an objective ground to our aesthetic preferences or evaluations. I am not saying this would mean beauty is completely objective, just that there could possibly be general objective principles at work, i.e., beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder.
⑧ Nature exhibits some of the universal aesthetic features, such as radiance, in a common way throughout the world. It’s not exactly the same everywhere, but it is common. For example, a sunset is similar enough in different places to warrant almost universal appeal.
⑨ Possible universal principles of beauty—such as proportion, fittingness, radiance, and others—are general categories, which allow for a wide array of embodiments. When people get involved in making artifacts in architecture or art, they apply these very general concepts in unique ways. But the way they applied the principle may not have universal appeal.
⑩This is why it’s important to experience diverse cultures and their artifacts because it opens us up to different ways of approaching or constructing beauty. And it is always good to question our assumptions.
