Is beauty objective or subjective?
The definition of beauty has always been a mystery. Throughout human history, numerous scholars have attempted to give “beauty” a specific definition. But the theories actually fall into two main categories. On one hand, as what Boundless has put forward, beauty is objective, and thus can be presented through some universal rules, including the combination of lines, the balance of color, the perfect proportion, etc. () On the other hand, others believe that beauty only lives our feelings, thus there’s no universal rules of beauty. This essay will argue for the latter definition, that beauty is a subjective concept, instead of an objective existence.
When judging the body figure of people, we tend to be subjective, …show more content…
Looking into the history of art, it’s hard to find an art movement, a technique, or even a painting material that haven’t been replaced for a long time. A case in point is perspective and cubism. Since the Early Renaissance in the 1400s, perspective has been widely used by European painters in their way of pursuing realism and idealism. By this mean, the depth of space is built and a better sense of harmony is created (). It seemed to be a dominated technique until the emergence of cubism, first introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the 1910s. It means the analyzation, breaking up and reassembling of objects (Wikipedia) and is well-known as one of the most influential visual art styles of the twentieth century. Guernica may be counted as the most impressive cubism masterpiece (1937; Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid), a powerfully visual language created after the breakout of the Spanish Civil War. With extensive chaos and disorder, Guernica is so horrifying that it has brought worldwide attention to this War. In this case, though perspective has been a mainstream technique for over 500 years, it can never be as impressive as cubism when the artists try to express negative emotion. In a word, people would act subjectively to both human figure and visual …show more content…
Pamela M Pallett, Stephen Link, and Kang Lee (2009) have found that people are holding similar preference of the composition of facial parts. They did the study among 20 university students. According to the result, participants tend to choose the faces with a length ratio of approximately 36% (). Despite that the fitting curvilinear function seems perfect, this research is still not supportive enough. Regardless of its much-too-small sample size, the nationality and educational background are also not diverse enough. Hence, the result may only suitable to a specific group of people and we cannot say it’s a universal rule. Most importantly, as a matter of fact, when we see something “beautiful”, our optic nerve just processes it as a physical signal. This gives rise to the activation of certain neurons. Then after a series of complex chemical reactions, our brain finally produces a signal of pleasure, which we comprehend as “beauty”. In this way, beauty is just a feeling, which must be subjective. Once we figure out the production of beauty, the conclusion seems clearly, since no way can we regard the similarity of subjective feelings as objective.
When we say “beauty is objective”, we mean that there’s an everlasting rule of beauty. Whichever painting or human figure that obeys it will be considered beautiful. However, by analyzing the change of mainstream opinions towards beauty, we finally
The definition of beauty has always been a mystery. Throughout human history, numerous scholars have attempted to give “beauty” a specific definition. But the theories actually fall into two main categories. On one hand, as what Boundless has put forward, beauty is objective, and thus can be presented through some universal rules, including the combination of lines, the balance of color, the perfect proportion, etc. () On the other hand, others believe that beauty only lives our feelings, thus there’s no universal rules of beauty. This essay will argue for the latter definition, that beauty is a subjective concept, instead of an objective existence.
When judging the body figure of people, we tend to be subjective, …show more content…
Looking into the history of art, it’s hard to find an art movement, a technique, or even a painting material that haven’t been replaced for a long time. A case in point is perspective and cubism. Since the Early Renaissance in the 1400s, perspective has been widely used by European painters in their way of pursuing realism and idealism. By this mean, the depth of space is built and a better sense of harmony is created (). It seemed to be a dominated technique until the emergence of cubism, first introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the 1910s. It means the analyzation, breaking up and reassembling of objects (Wikipedia) and is well-known as one of the most influential visual art styles of the twentieth century. Guernica may be counted as the most impressive cubism masterpiece (1937; Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid), a powerfully visual language created after the breakout of the Spanish Civil War. With extensive chaos and disorder, Guernica is so horrifying that it has brought worldwide attention to this War. In this case, though perspective has been a mainstream technique for over 500 years, it can never be as impressive as cubism when the artists try to express negative emotion. In a word, people would act subjectively to both human figure and visual …show more content…
Pamela M Pallett, Stephen Link, and Kang Lee (2009) have found that people are holding similar preference of the composition of facial parts. They did the study among 20 university students. According to the result, participants tend to choose the faces with a length ratio of approximately 36% (). Despite that the fitting curvilinear function seems perfect, this research is still not supportive enough. Regardless of its much-too-small sample size, the nationality and educational background are also not diverse enough. Hence, the result may only suitable to a specific group of people and we cannot say it’s a universal rule. Most importantly, as a matter of fact, when we see something “beautiful”, our optic nerve just processes it as a physical signal. This gives rise to the activation of certain neurons. Then after a series of complex chemical reactions, our brain finally produces a signal of pleasure, which we comprehend as “beauty”. In this way, beauty is just a feeling, which must be subjective. Once we figure out the production of beauty, the conclusion seems clearly, since no way can we regard the similarity of subjective feelings as objective.
When we say “beauty is objective”, we mean that there’s an everlasting rule of beauty. Whichever painting or human figure that obeys it will be considered beautiful. However, by analyzing the change of mainstream opinions towards beauty, we finally