What is beauty? Is beauty in the object or in the eye of the beholder? Is beauty mere symmetry or is there beauty in asymmetry? Is beauty objective or subjective? These are some of the questions to be pondered by anyone looking to understand beauty...

It may be beauty is neither in the object or the subject. It may be we do not create beauty and it's simply another phenomenon of nature. Like a law of instinctive resonance at a level which is beyond our normal awareness, yet part of the creative cosmos we live in.

In order to understand beauty we may have to look at it's effects on the human mind, which may go deeper than superficial explanations like dopamine release.

mostly agree above, but i would say the one way to address this question more deeply is perhaps go to go an art gallery and look at the work of artists. something i miss sooo much in these covid times.

this is my first post not sure if this works

Art is beautiful because the concepts of it entertains the mind, but if we saw too well we would see every brush stroke and it might eventually seem nondiliberate? Is beauty less about seeing and more about understanding? Dopamine isn't superficial. That is how memories are created so strong impressions can be left.

I think beauty is more about understanding than visual sense, but we approach it at least initially through the visual sense, through appearance. We share beauty with others not just through appearance, though, but also by talking about it - expressing judgements or opinions, describing affected experiences, etc.

Beauty is connected to intentionality or purposiveness. Is a non-deliberate brush stroke less beautiful than a deliberate one? Is the purpose of each brush stroke to impose order or to reflect it? Kant explores this in his third Critique, particularly Aesthetics.

Art is traditionally considered ‘beautiful’ only to the extent that the state of engaging with it can align with existing concepts of the mind. Where art challenges conceptual structures with an idea, there is often a sense of discomfort, but this also engages the mind, and at a higher level. Is it then still beautiful? It seems only to the extent that we have sufficient information to accommodate a paradigm shift, and to re-establish a sense of aligning the experience with our (adjusted) conceptual structures.

Modern art questions whether the making of art should challenge or reinforce our conceptual structure of beauty within a broader aesthetic context (inclusive of the sublime), and to what extent.

From another angle, physicist/philosopher Carlo Rovelli points out that the disorder we perceive in the world (entropy) is on account of our ignorance - a ‘blurring’ of perspective, or lack of understanding reality at a microscopic level.

And does beauty require a certain amount of detail, but a limit? — TiredThinker

Go to timestamp 10:59 in the video below,

Painting by Bernado Bellotto

Two kinds of beauty:

1. Real beauty: Details, details, details. Fractals & Symmetry. Beauty, as symmetry, is preserved at all levels of reality, from the atomic to the cosmic. No one except maybe, just maybe Benoit Mandelbrot has created it (Mandelbrot Set) and oh! God (assuming God exists)

2. Illusory beauty: Lack of detail. Like the Bernado Bellotto painting mentioned above, closer inspection reveals "only blobs or broad brush strokes of paint." Many artists have created it.

I just remember I think it was Buzz Aldren said the surface of the moon was the least hospitable place he had ever seen. Just cold ridge rock formation. From earth we imagine a face and the details aren't focused well because of distance, but it looks graceful and magical. High detail photos of the moon seem far less flattering and you see the places meteors hit it over millennium.