Beauty is the term used to describe a quality or characteristic which gives pleasure to the aesthetic senses. This includes colour, body shape, age, gender, and race. It can also be a morally neutral quality or feature.
Beauty is a fundamental aspect of all design projects. It has the power to engender emotions and create emotional reaction in its audience. Typically, beauty is seen as an abstract concept that requires no intellectual underpinning. In order to understand how and why we perceive beauty, we must look to its roots in classical philosophy.
Aristotle and Plato both considered beauty to be an objective reality that could be experienced by the mind. But they differed in how they viewed it. Aristotle believed that beauty is not only an empirical fact of nature, but that it is also a divine quality. He was also more dispassionate in his analysis of beauty than was Plato.
Plotinus, on the other hand, argued that beauty is not a combination of physical attributes. He also observed that it is impossible to define beauty by a single aesthetic principle. However, he did explain that beauty could exist in the objective world.
While both philosophers espoused the notion that beauty is not reducible to physical attributes, they were unable to provide an explanation for how one would be able to understand the meaning of such a quality. Thomas Aquinas’ answer, which satisfies the criteria for a unified theory of beauty, provides an explanation for this gap.
Beauty is a combination of qualities, including harmony, aesthetics, and symmetry. It is also closely related to the concept of bonus. As a result, the terms are often confusing and can lead to misunderstandings.
Art is an expression of the artist’s feelings or perceptions about the world. Often, art is made with little intellect and is a way for the artist to get into a trance, so that he or she can create something. Whether the work is created for beauty, for entertainment, or for profit, the integrity of the work must be assessed. If the painting is realistic and the woman looks like a three-eyed chimpanzee, it does not have the integrity that is required for a painting that is beautiful.
Similarly, there is no clear cut definition of beauty, though experts often agree on its general characteristics. One theory focuses on the relationship between the elements of beauty, which are organization and complexity. The classical conception of beauty asserts that there is a harmony between parts, defining them as being in proportion and in proper relation to each other. Similarly, Sagmeister and Walsh use an equation M = O/C to determine the beauty of a particular object.
For example, a cubist painting of a woman with three eyes is not beautiful if it is realistic. On the other hand, a photograph of a beautiful sunset does not have the integrity of a cubist painting that is similar, even if it is more realistic.