Who Cares About Aesthetics?

Perhaps one of the most consistent and ubiquitous forms of oral human tradition is the humble proverb. These snippets of collective wisdom are found globally, thriving due to their naked simplicity in communication and comprehension. Folk sayings like “a watched pot never boils” are designed to convey moral lessons that are often too difficult or time-consuming to describe literally.

Given their nature as moral ZIP files, it would be natural to assume that adages are heavily culture-loaded — an assumption that would be right, for the most part. Yet within the global proverbial lexicon, there seem to exist several underlying motifs that converge around the same deeply human topics with only slight variations in substance.

One topic of particular thematic interest, at least to me, centers around the epistemology of beauty — think common quips like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or “don’t judge a book by its cover.”

This should come as no surprise. Aesthetic questions influence many of our day-to-day decisions, from what color combination to wear in the morning to vacillating about font size when working on an essay at 2 a.m. In essence, the ubiquitous desire of humans across cultures to seek out what we perceive to be beautiful seems to represent a process of sensory optimization, a claim that has received such empirical validation that an entire new field of scientific inquiry, “neuroaesthetics,” has spawned.

Ironically, if the pursuit of beauty is considered one of the most unifying aspects of human behavior, what each individual finds to be aesthetically pleasing is arguably one of the most diverse. Take, for instance, how we so frequently strive to distinguish ourselves in our choices in fashion, for tied to them is a significant portion of our individual identity.

Our dedication to seek out our unique definitions of beauty manifests itself as well in the type of art that we both profess to and authentically enjoy. Ever the Frasier fan, I am reminded of how Niles Crane, when denied access to a high society production, laments in his characteristic haughtiness: “I have to have people see me see this play.” Indeed, when making outwardly visible aesthetic judgments about some creative work made by others, we naturally consider, whether consciously or not, how our opinion of it might be perceived by others.

Given our status as social creatures, it isn’t too difficult to understand why we do this, but it does nevertheless foment a kind of artistic groupthink that, for the sake of a better culture around producing and enjoying the fruits of human creativity, we should strive to mitigate.

After all, consider what we might have today if the Victorian contemporaries of Impressionist maestro Gustave Courbet — the works of whom feature extensively in the Harvard Art Museum’s collections — made a conscious effort to separate, say, a solely aesthetic critique of his affinity for dark pastels rather than focusing their grievances on his passion for depicting rural life (or in the words of one detractor, for painting “peasants in their Sunday best”). Would we not be living in a world with, if not more Courbetesque works, then at least greater confidence in his authentic voice shining through in the existing corpus?

When an individual’s opinion about the creative efforts of others becomes overly tinged with preconceptions or prejudices, often because of a desire to parrot the thoughts of their social ingroups and gain greater acceptance or internal status, it is our collective artistic heritage that categorically suffers.

So don’t worry too much about how your unique aesthetic tastes in art, music, clothing, or anything else are perceived by friends and family. If we are to discard any remaining notions about the dualism of body and mind and accept the preponderance of empirical evidence that the latter arises in some fashion from the former, then we must logically conclude that sensations such as aesthetic pleasure possess a fundamentally biological basis.

To put it another way, what you or I find particularly beautiful emerges from mechanisms no different in character than those that govern everything from our choice of sleep schedule or preference for chocolate versus vanilla ice cream. The classic proverbs, in all their rustic wisdom, really do stand the test of time: Beauty truly does lie in the eyes of each and every one of us.

Alexander Junxiang Chen ’24 is a Neuroscience and Chemistry concentrator in Quincy House. His column “Artifactual” appears on Thursdays.