Pleasure and appeal are individual experiences that are difficult to describe. No single definition of aesthetic pleasure appears to be satisfactory.
A good start would be to remove taste from the discussion. Taste is too narrow a lens and frequently ends up separating people. Having “good taste” elevates some while diminishing others. A brand may appeal to a certain taste, but to focus only on that narrow audience is limiting. Taste restricts, and it constricts.
While taste has an ability to be defined, beauty, on the other hand, is purely without intellectual entanglement. It is an event, one that cannot be experienced at will nor be re-created. We encounter beauty, uncoerced.
Beautification is superficial, disconnected from fundamental uses and universal truths of existence. It reacts to time and history. When things become unfashionable or worn over time, the response is beautification.
There is an exhibit value to beautification and style. Style can be consumed, updated, and consumed again, while beauty cannot. Style is overdescribed, overfamiliar, and overconcretized, while beauty remains outside that cycle.
Beauty, the product of hospitality, acceptance, and lived experience, has greater connective potential than the transactional, insistent, and captioned world of style.
“Beauty is uninterested in any subject it might encounter.”
/美学