The popular saying is, of course, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but the truth is that it is actually in the mind. It is what we think is beautiful, graceful, dignified, etc. that defines what we classify as beautiful, graceful, dignified, etc. And it is as varied as the number of people that exist in the world.
Oh, we can agree on generic boundaries but ask a group of people as individuals to rank a series of pictures and you'd be surprised at the results. A percentage will rank the same pictures in the top group although the order will probably vary. But if you were to give 50 people 50 photos to sort through, the odds that the same number of photos and the same photos would end up in the same classifications are not 100%.
Take a look at any poll that lists percentages of respondents. It is rare to have a poll where the top person/object/ideal etc is over 90%. Most of the time the percentage will be under 80%. The difference will usually be in polls that rate political issues, news issues, social or religious beliefs, etc. Things that are not defined by an abstract concept.
Because beauty is an abstract concept. We are conditioned in part by society's acceptance of what is beautiful, pretty, attractive, ugly, etc. Don't believe me? Look at the history of fashion models and see how the size of the models has changed as society's beauty image has changed.
Art, poetry, and music are the areas where the definition of beauty is challenged the most by critics. Personally, I find abstract art to be ridiculous when considered as a serious art form. I'm not good at drawing but I can paint as well as or better than any abstract artist. At least, in my opinion. Because it is an opinion that sets up an art form as serious art. That opinion is always expressed by a group of art critics. Professional art critics. (Hmm, how can I get a job as one because I can't believe they had training for that job.) (That was a sarcastic comment btw not to be taken seriously).
It all comes down to personal opinions for how popular any piece of art, music, and writing is. While I would never buy an abstract painting, i would buy landscapes and animal pictures. Same for music, there are certain genres I can't stand (grunge) while there are others that I can listen to forever. Same for certain authors. While there have been relatively few authors I can't stand, I will give most a few tries with different stories to see if I like their style.
Which leads to what made me pick today's topic. I take public transport and a few years ago a project was put forth to add signs with poetry written specifically for the buses. They could be any subject but had to fit on the signs. So most people who contributed to the project wrote free form poetry.
Now, I've written free form poetry but I always kept a beat with it. Blame it on my upbringing, I was taught that poetry was supposed to have rhythm if not rhyme. So even free form still had a beat. Otherwise all I was reading (or writing) was prose in non-standard form.
This is where the concept of beauty comes in. To me, a well-written poem has rhythm, might have rhyme, and has a beat that's easy to pick up and follow. The words might not be clear in imagery and meaning but the piece flows together. It is beautiful.
But the poems on the buses? Shudder. The sentences are of varying lengths so there's no beat, no rhythm. It's like listening to a person speaking quickly with a break between each sentence. I have the impression of being jerked from sentence to sentence. So I tend to no longer read the poems.
Which is probably doing someone a disservice. There might be a great piece of poetry on one of the buses that I will miss. Because it's like walking through a museum of Picasso paintings. I tune them out so I will most likely walk straight past a Rembrandt that's been slipped in.
Because to my mind, beauty has form.
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