Do we create beauty?
Are things naturally beautiful or do we make them so in our brains to exercise our brain chemistry? In particularly getting dopamine with minimal effort. And does beauty require a certain amount of detail, but a limit? For example we see a beautiful face that seems flawless, perhaps mathematically very well balanced. But we know if we had eagle eyes we would see so many flaws that human eyes can't. This offers us room for imagining things. Maybe more along the lines of ideas, concepts, and assuming virtues where our perception of visual detail leaves off.
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It may be beauty is neither in the object or the subject. It may be we do not create beauty and it's simply another phenomenon of nature. Like a law of instinctive resonance at a level which is beyond our normal awareness, yet part of the creative cosmos we live in.
In order to understand beauty we may have to look at it's effects on the human mind, which may go deeper than superficial explanations like dopamine release.
this is my first post not sure if this works
Art is beautiful because the concepts of it entertains the mind, but if we saw too well we would see every brush stroke and it might eventually seem nondiliberate? Is beauty less about seeing and more about understanding? Dopamine isn't superficial. That is how memories are created so strong impressions can be left.
Beauty is connected to intentionality or purposiveness. Is a non-deliberate brush stroke less beautiful than a deliberate one? Is the purpose of each brush stroke to impose order or to reflect it? Kant explores this in his third Critique, particularly Aesthetics.
Art is traditionally considered ‘beautiful’ only to the extent that the state of engaging with it can align with existing concepts of the mind. Where art challenges conceptual structures with an idea, there is often a sense of discomfort, but this also engages the mind, and at a higher level. Is it then still beautiful? It seems only to the extent that we have sufficient information to accommodate a paradigm shift, and to re-establish a sense of aligning the experience with our (adjusted) conceptual structures.
Modern art questions whether the making of art should challenge or reinforce our conceptual structure of beauty within a broader aesthetic context (inclusive of the sublime), and to what extent.
From another angle, physicist/philosopher Carlo Rovelli points out that the disorder we perceive in the world (entropy) is on account of our ignorance - a ‘blurring’ of perspective, or lack of understanding reality at a microscopic level.
Go to timestamp 10:59 in the video below,
Painting by Bernado Bellotto
Two kinds of beauty:
1. Real beauty: Details, details, details. Fractals & Symmetry. Beauty, as symmetry, is preserved at all levels of reality, from the atomic to the cosmic. No one except maybe, just maybe Benoit Mandelbrot has created it (Mandelbrot Set) and oh! God (assuming God exists)
2. Illusory beauty: Lack of detail. Like the Bernado Bellotto painting mentioned above, closer inspection reveals "only blobs or broad brush strokes of paint." Many artists have created it.