r/arttheory

Beauty is more objective than people like to admit. People have different tastes, but we still agree on a lot of things being beautiful, whether it’s people, art, or architecture.
Things like symmetry, good proportions, balance, and harmony are often seen as beautiful across different cultures.
So beauty isn’t just “whatever I like.” Personal taste matters, but some things really do have qualities that make them more beautiful than others.
We have all heard that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and that’s true just to a much lesser degree than we would like to admit.

Dictated body of text (might have some grammar errors):

So one of the things that really stuck with me when I went to UCD, and they really taught us, you know, a lot of concepts about postmodernism. Unfortunately, I only did my bachelor's, and I wanted to go into, you know, academia, but I wanted to get some money after, so I didn't. But one of the things that really struck me about postmodernism, I remember in the first day, first lecture we had, no shit, this is the first day, the teacher asked, What is art?

And everybody's, you know, and, you know, the teacher asked a lot of people, put their hands up, and everybody gave a lot of, you know, answers, you know, Oh, art is like a painting. Art is, you display it in an art gallery, or art is a, you know, it's a message being delivered to you through, you know, something. But then the lecturer did something cool, asked something like, Would you consider, you know, the sunset and the sunrise as art? Would you say the birds tweeting is art?

You know? And, you know, obviously it made people think, because a lot of people would say yes, but also some people would say no. But then the question becomes, What is art? You know? A lot of people would externalize the answer, like, Oh, it's a book. It's a painting. It's a sculpture. It's something you put in a museum. But then the teacher said something along the lines of, Art is not a thing. It's how you look at a thing, you know? And a lot of my undergrad is kind of like based on that concept, where, like, you know, your perception shapes, you know, reality, or rather your perception is reality. So let me explain. Just for example, let's just say, like a stop sign, right?

Like, would you say that's art today? Like most people would say no. It's just a fucking stop sign. It's a function of the road. But get this: if you put a stop sign in the middle of a postmodernist museum, it suddenly evokes something. You know, it evokes a reaction, discussion, critique, and, you know, some kind of, like, dissection of a hidden meaning of why there's a fucking stop sign in a museum or art exhibition. And then suddenly it makes sense that, like, art is not a thing. It's how you look at a thing.

Unfortunately, I didn't really delve too much into it, into that specific sort of, like, postmodernist topic, because I went a little bit more into, like, gender studies, basically. But I really wanted to explore that, but I think that was more of a master's thing. But what do you think?