Because this brings it back full circle back to the fact that ”Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” This in term allows the berth of legitimizing what used to be considered Ugly as Beautiful see: “Big is beautiful” and the “Fat acceptance movement”

Objectivity exists regardless of perception or the opinions of human. Like the objective excellence of God is true regardless of how man regards God.

Beauty is Beauty regardless of how rebellious man attempts to redefine its meaning. Objectivity cannot be redefined.

No, not even close. I know you accused me of buying into Modernism, but here’s where I accuse you of actually being the one who’s doing that – the IFLS Modernist, caught up in scientism, is the one who thinks that something is either objective or invalid; objectively provable or nonexistent. I don’t accept that frame at all, and I think that finding “subjective” to be a dirty word is pure Modernist thinking. I don’t understand the drive to prove that everything we love or find valuable can be proven worthwhile by some objective standard. Not only is this doomed to failure-by-deconstruction, I don’t even find it necessary – Why do you feel the need to kiss up to IFLS? Tell them that they’re uncultured boors and they should go back to fixing computers.

We can objectively measure the things we find beautiful – symmetry, harmony, color balance, etc. – but to say that they are beautiful assigns them a subjective value. That may be a subjective value that will be perceived near-universally among humans, but that doesn’t make it not subjective. Humans do subjectivity. It’s easy to mistake a near-universal subjective reaction among subjective beings for objectivity, but it isn’t that, and it wouldn’t take much to deconstruct the notion that it is.

Why are we all so intent on denying the value of subjective human thought? Why do we need to turn everything into a math problem?

Sounds like you accept the modern notion that only properties that can be quantified are objective and independent of us. If beauty is purely subjective it means it is objectively non-existent. It is a mere state of mind that refers to nothing outside of mind. In that case there is no way you can communicate it to others. What then are we talking about here?

I believe that the particular state of mind is triggered by something outside of mind which means it is objective and mind-independent as mass or any other property of a thing though, as you say, a non-quantifiable property. If humanity had never existed beauty of mountains would still be there as well as mass etc.

Science seems to support this view as mentioned in the article. That some aesthetic preferences are result of our biology suggests that beauty is an objective pattern that manifests itself in the world and creatures (at least intelligent creatures) benefit from perceiving it.

“. . . representational depictions of attractive or important people . . . have all been forbidden in high art.”

Is Warhol high or low?

Personally, if there’s anything I find supremely offensive, it’s middlebrow culture. Stuff like HBO series and “intellectual” comics like Maus by Art Spiegelman. That’s a whole other story.

Look, a mountain has mass, objectively. It would have mass if no human was there to measure it. It would have mass if humanity had never existed. It would not have beauty if that were the case. Perceiving beauty is a subjective reaction of sentient beings. It is not objective. It cannot be proven mathematically. It does not exist independent of the subjective perceptions of sentient beings.

If you try to beat Modernists within their own (bad) frame, you’re going to get your ass kicked. Sam Harris’s attempts to show that morality can be objectively proven via the scientific method are a truly laughable bunch of rationalizations, gross oversimplifications, and logical fallacies that end up in the perfect marriage of junk science and junk philosophy, and your attempts to show that beauty can be objectively proven won’t go any better.

Don’t do that. Don’t let them set the frame. Admit that you can’t prove beauty objectively, but then say: “So fucking what?” Again, “subjective” is not a synonym for “unknowable”. Things that are not objectively knowable can still be validly knowable. I don’t care if a bunch of Tumblr aspies can’t understand why that’s true. Remember, excessively literal thinking is not a sign of intelligence – it’s just a sign of autism. Make fun of them for being the autistic, uncultured, boorish, tasteless automatons that they are.

The rise of the IFLS left has given us the perfect chance to recapture the banner of high culture from the left, which used to own it through its middlebrow, PBS-watching, bourgeois pretenses to “loving the arts”. Now they think – they publicly and loudly proclaim – that high culture is The Big Bang Theory and high philosophy is Black Science Man. Like so many principles and pretenses that they discard when they no longer think them useful, they’ve dropped the defense of high culture – pick up that ball and run with it.

So is the leaf really orange at night?

High art was sponsored, paid for, by the traditional elite, the aristocracy. It was supposed to be mysterious.

The mystery of People magazine: how very rich, attractive, and in most cases, intelligent people can find ways to be dull and predictable.

My advice, avoid pop culture.

The former alternative is a non-starter. If beauty is only in the eye of the beholder, then what we call the beautiful is not really beautiful in fact, and in itself, but rather only seems so. In that case, our apprehensions of beauty are not verisimilar; they are, to put it bluntly, false. But if all our apprehensions of beauty are false, beauty is not real, but only an illusion, a mere phantasm. To say that beauty is only subjective then is tantamount to saying that it does not exist – or, at most, that it has the same sort and degree of existence as the delusions of a madman.

That dog won’t hunt. We experience everything as more or less beautiful; whatever else it is, experience per se is an evaluation. And you just can’t get very far with a theory that says, “everything you experience is wrong.”

Whether or not it exists in our own minds, then, beauty must exist independently of us. It must be an objective character of reality, every bit as concrete as mass or energy. More, even, perhaps; mass and energy might be a species of beauty, given that, since being is the forecondition of all other subsidiary goods, and is thus the good of all goodness, therefore whatever exists is ipso facto somehow beautiful, to some minimal degree.

Is mass a species of beauty? Pick up a rock, and heft it. Is there not something strangely pleasant in its weight, and resistance? Think of a rock too heavy for you to lift. Is there not something noble in its greatness? If having failed to lift it you then went and trained with weights for a few months so that you were able to come back and succeed at doing so, it would be a noteworthy achievement, which would feel grand, no? Whence that grandeur, if the mere mass of the rock were not itself inherently grand, so that overcoming it was therefore grander?

As physical aspects of sheer actuality, then, mass and energy would seem to be aspects of sheer beauty.

Our feelings of beauty then may be simply what it is like to apprehend the actuality of something. Such feelings might be intense because we apprehend something extraordinarily actual in itself – i.e., unusually excellent, consequential, powerful, sublime, important, significant, large, immaculate, etc. – or because we pay extraordinarily close attention to something quite normal, thus noticing its excellence, significance, and so forth, better than we usually do. Or both, of course.

Everest would be beautiful, then, even if no one was looking at it. If it was not, then it could not be beautiful to those who do look at it, but rather only “beautiful.”

Everest is beautiful, furthermore, even though there are perspectives from which its beauty is not apparent – such as the perspective of the room where I now sit, in California, or the perspective of an observer in the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromedan and I cannot see Everest at all; so we cannot see that Everest is beautiful (or anything else). And there may be observers who can see Everest perfectly well, but who are blind to its beauty, or at least to such aspects of its beauty as bear down so forcefully upon us – a gnat, say, or a snake. But that we must look at Everest in a certain way to see its beauty does not mean that the beauty is anywise unreal or merely phenomenal. In the daylight, I can see the orange of the leaf; at night, I cannot. This does not mean that the color of the leaf, the aspects of its being that give rise to my phenomenal experience of its color, are unreal. So likewise with beauty.”
-Kristor

http://orthosphere.org/2015/04/16/the-beauty-of-being/

I’m mostly describing conservatives in the twenty-first century, definitely some of the paleocons. Scruton as well. Some White Nationalists also, for sure. I have some issues with Pound’s interpretation of literary history, but he is no enemy of mine; in fact, he’s one of my biggest inspirations.

There is a very real tendency for conservatives to start talking about how the Left killed beauty. I don’t believe that for a second. It feeds beauty to the proles every day. Just look at all the beautiful people in People magazine. “High art” represents more of a challenge for the elites to see beauty in difficult or challenging things, but it’s far from an assault on beauty. It’s more like a weird sort of mystical exercise.

As for Hirst, I think the problem of authorship is an interesting one, and definitely worth some theorizing, but I’m not really concerned with that at the moment.