It implies an acute sensitivity to conflict and a fear of being rude or mean to others.

When we use the phrase, what we seem to be trying to say is that there should be a lot of room for intelligent disagreement around aesthetics – and that we don’t feel comfortable about asserting the superiority of any one style or approach over any other. We have background aesthetic principles, even if we rarely articulate them – and are correspondingly very aware of moments when our tastes might clash with those of another. If beauty simply lay in the eye of beholders, then it would presumably be sane to stand up and assert that a rubbish dump smelling of urine and decomposing fecal matter was a lovely place:Īnd that these modern canal side houses in Amsterdam were hideous:Īnd it might then be logical to suggest that it would be OK to pull down the houses and replace them with a rubbish dump.īut of course, no one would want that – which shows that, in reality, we don’t actually believe that beauty does lie entirely in the eye of beholders. We may well accept that there can be legitimate differences in taste within a reasonable spectrum but we don’t actually think that all tastes are equal. NOT ALL TASTES ARE EQUALįor a start, no one really believes in it to its core. It should, in our view, be avoided at all costs. However, the phrase ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’ is in reality almost always unwarranted and deeply troublesome. The certainties of science have – unwittingly – made sensible debate in the humanities feel imperious and redundant. Yet because notions of beauty and ugliness lie outside the system of scientific proof, it’s routinely assumed that they must then lie in a realm of total relativism – and that no progress whatsoever can be made towards arriving at better or worse answers about what looks good. One can’t fairly say: ‘Well I don’t really feel that way about the boiling point of water or the nature of gravity.’ We have to be subservient to the facts science hands down to us. The things it passes judgement on are obviously simply not in the eye of beholders. Science, the most prestigious force in modern society, deals in objective truths. This tendency to surrender to relativism is a paradoxical symptom of a scientific age. Once it’s been uttered, trying to keep up a dialogue about the merits or drawbacks of certain visual things can come across as shrill, anti-social or just plain rude. There’s often someone around who very quickly closes the discussion down by saying: “Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder”

When there are grave disagreements about what’s good and bad in architecture…

Definition beholder