Beauty is that which pleases our senses the most and remains relative to our own receptors. Extraneous to that there is no such quality.

It's the hormones which decide.

Belinda wrote:(Nested quote removed.)



But we need truth as well as beauty.Can art be good without truth? You may as well ask if anything can be good wthout truth.

Actually I never could quite figure out why truth necessarily would have anything to do with art. Not that it can't apply but would truth be a mandatory ingredient for art to subsist as Art? It's not that obvious to me! Can literature also be described as art in the same way as painting, sculpture, music? What creates truth in art?

HANDSON wrote:Truth in art is necessary for it to resonate with who we are. Without a personal connection of some sort, experientially or imaginatively, art would be without meaning. The truth lies in the connectivity of the art work to each one of us who are able to appreciate it.

That would imply that truth in art is very much a subjective experience, a verification of its value by its corresponding emotional impact. In that sense truth as a feedback medium can exist in any guise not least as a religious experience whose "subjective truth" can be annulled by its objective counterpart.

To me art has much less alliance with truth as such than of a highly skilled implementation of the imagination that when acknowledged presents itself as a simulacrum of truth, an experience which can be extremely potent.

What's truly important are the feelings and inflections received and not the words which attempt to describe it.

There is hardly a human artifact which is not based on some kind of aesthetic. Whether or not it's your aesthetic is beside the point. Even medieval torture instruments can be beautifully crafted works of art and skill to be admired in spite of knowing what they were meant for or depict as for example in crucifixions.

Every language has its limitations. In English a structural deficiency exists in the word truth which in other languages may have more connotations or approximations in regard to the relative values of Truth. In English the word has to be constantly defined, redefined or qualified because there is only one term for it.

As already mentioned, "truth" most often is a vague and ambiguous word subject to interpretation by everyone who needs to customize it according to their values or responses. It can hardly exist external to the subjective which becomes most salient, most declarative when beauty is equated with truth except when truth, as usual, denotes personal responses to an object. In short, truth, beauty is in the eyes/ears of the beholder. So goes the cliché! There is no philosophic distillation of what either really means.

If you truly admire or love something, yes! you can supply reasons but you will never really know what "intrinsically" set you on fire. Your explanation may be rational, even philosophic to better conceptualize one's truth connotations but the cause of it is and remains a mystery. Applying Truth to Beauty is a personal equation. Neither can be said to be referenced by the other. Anyway, that's how I see it but that again is "only" another interpretation based on subtracting philosophy or idealism from qualities which seem so effortless to interrelate.