Hrm... my latest riff on beauty is that it's the "upper margin of expectation". Raph Koster defines Fun as the upper margin of skill, where you're just good enough that the activity isn't frustrating, but just challenging enough that the activity isn't boring. Having recently listened to Leonard Bernstein examine Beethoven's 6th in purely musical terms, I concluded that beauty was the upper margin of expectation, where it's in keeping with past tradition (the original motif) just enough that it's familiar, but novel and surprising enough that it's not dull or plain.
Thus, of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's the beholder who has traditions. A beautiful landscape to me would be wild and insane to someone who'd just come out of a lifetime in a closet. And it's the beholder who has a threshold of enduring novelty: how much change, transformation, can you put something through before it's no longer beautiful, but weird?
Idle thoughts.
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