We must disabuse ourselves of the cultural wisdom that says that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It really is foolish to think so, and all one need do to expose the folly of the idea is to do a few simple thought experiments.
Consider the glories of White Sands, New Mexico, or Yosemite National Park, or a simple garden. One could say that they don't think white sand is all that beautiful, and they would be within their right of preferences to say so. My question is why on earth think that such a proclamation makes it the case that there is no beauty in the place? Surely the foolishness of thinking that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" commits us to the conviction that if someone condemns a thing as ugly, then it really is ugly. It is abominable precisely because it grounds beauty in perception alone.
The truth is that beauty is no more subjective than goodness is subjective. We can thank modern popular art and modern education for convincing many people today that both are subjective, but if they are correct then there really is no meaning to proclaiming anything good or beautiful. There would be no meaning to growth in aesthetics. A child's scribblings would have to be considered as beautiful as any masterpiece. Why do we even speak in terms of excellence in art if there is no standard of true beauty? Why do we rank music or films or wine?
As one who works in the wine industry and studies it on my own time I can see that there really is such a thing as bad art in winemaking. There are wines that are dull, flabby, thin, burnt, corked, painfully acidic, one-dimensional, past their glory, and flawed. Just because there are people who might interpret such wines as good does no more to make them good than does a fool's appreciation of folly make it wisdom. Truth makes a constant appearing in aesthetics, and when we think about it we know it to be a good thing that it does.
The odd thing is that the first reaction of most people when you start arguing for standards in beauty is to think you are a snob; that you are enshrining your own tastes as though they should be the standard by which all interpret beauty. But curiously it is the subjective beauty advocate who ends up truly enshrining human ego as the basis for all beliefs about beauty. I'm arguing that beauty is objective, which means then that anyone who is serious about finding it will be able to do so. He is arguing that beauty is a constantly moving target, and that the only way to find it is to agree with his capricious convictions about what is beautiful. But he might be one of those cranks who thinks that feces thrown against a canvas is art.
My own conviction is that while beauty is true and meaningful and objective, it is also magnificently plentiful! Why is it that we think of beauty as a scarcity? I may be wrong, but I see this problem among women. A pretty woman may encounter another pretty woman at a party and secretly believe that the other woman's beauty makes her own illegitimate. But surely when we are thinking clearly we realize that there may be two or more beautiful women in a room, and isn't that a glorious fact? Their beauty may be merely unique expressions of beauty in much the same way that a hill in Texas and a hill in California are both unique expressions of beauty, though they are different in myriad ways.
Back to wine for a moment. Why think that the beauty of one wine or one region invalidates the beauty of another? Is blue more glorious than red? Again, I'm not advocating for mere subjective preference as a foundation for beauty; nor am I suggesting that everything is beautiful. I'm saying that both red and blue are beautiful, and to prefer one over the other is fine, but it is laughable hubris for a person to think that his preference for blue makes red ugly. To say that one excellent wine that exhibits currant and blackberry notes is better than another excellent wine that exhibits truffle and earth notes is to enthrone one's ego as the final arbiter of beauty rather than allowing beauty to announce itself for what it is.
On the other hand, to suggest that simple mass produced jug wine is as good as a Duckhorn Merlot is simply incorrect! It may come from an immature pallet or arrogance or ignorance, but simply drinking easy bulk wine to extract alcohol from it is not to appreciate wine as art. This is one of the problems with young drinkers. You notice that teens rarely have wine-tasting parties, where they are studying the artistic production of quality wine in order to appreciate its complexity, subtlety, and beauty. No, they are usually drinking cheap beer and wine and hard liquor in order to alter their pubescent minds. They are moved by their passions alone.
In many ways I'm arguing that maturation assumes an end. We hope that children grow up and learn to appreciate the good, the true, and the beautiful. That assumes there are such things, and also requires allowing the suppression of the passions of youth for the emergence of reason and spirit in one's life. We hope that our young people will abandon foolish occupations and ideas as they mature, and we hope they will be compensated for their maturation with the pleasures not just of the body or the passions but of the mind as well. We hope they will be supplied with the gift of wisdom to make sense of the whole human experience. In short, we hope they learn to live truly good and truly beautiful lives.
