whnay.'s good taste thread - Page 247

You keep skipping past the non-trivial difference between “not ideal” and “objectively bad.”

But anyway, consider for a moment two things that do lay just claim to being considered objectively, as opposed to conventionally, aesthetically pleasing.

First, the ancient Greeks recognized the “golden ratio” the equation for which you can look up, but the point is, it results in a ratio of two unequal parts, let’s call them A and B, where A is longer/larger than B and A is to A+B what B is to A. Or, doing the math, 1:1.618 …

Now, for about 2,500 years aestheticians of various kinds—including sculptors, architects and so on—have incorporated this ratio into their works, many of which—including the Parthenon—are considered to be among the most successfully aesthetically pleasing of all time. There appears to be something about the Golden Ratio that appeals to the human eyes and brain on a structural level that transcends not only the medium but even time, place and culture. Perhaps not everyone cares or sees it or “feels” it but most do, which is what makes it objectively aesthetically superior.

Or consider male opinions of female beauty. Modern conventional wisdom would have us believe that this is all relative to man viewing but many studies have shown that is not so. There certain things that all men, more or less everywhere, find pleasing, among them facial symmetry and a 0.7 waist-hip ratio. Ask a random, representative sample of men to rank various women and the results will be strikingly consistent. There may be differences in the margins—Joe says Jane is a 7, Jim says she’s an 8—but Joe, Jim and everyone else will all agree on the 7-8 v. the 3-4 and even the 5-6.

So, in one sense beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, if what is meant is that standards of beauty are completely relative and have no static frame of reference. But in another sense beauty IS in the eye of the beholder because there is no other metric for judging it. If something does not appear to be beautiful then it is not. There can be things of extreme refinement that most people will not “get” that are nonetheless beautiful—the Grosse Fugue comes to mind. But the chances that something can be objectively ugly but only understood to be so by one person are vanishingly remote, and almost a logical impossibility.

What we really have here is a non-rule rule. Well, fine. One of my non-rule rules is no solid socks. I literally own one pair of solid (black) dress socks, which I only wear with chef clogs. But there is nothing incorrect or even aesthetically bad about them, I just don’t like them.