I think I've used feminine beauty as an example in my previous post. I'll bring that up again since it seems to serve the purpose here. Feminine beauty is, I think, more concrete than the beauty of, say, literary works, and yet we'd be hard pressed to find any standard that applies to every person in every culture at every time period. Slimness of figure? The Tang Dynasty of China is famous for admiring large women. Large breasts? Ancient Chinese tend to like small, delicate breasts. 99% of Chinese would tell you that Lucy Liu is ugly. "Times" obviously does not think so, as it has listed her as one of the world's 100 most attractive people.
SLG- I will agree with you that an objective standard of beauty or aesthetics (or morality, religion, etc...) is an impossibility in a world in which we do noy (thank God) all think and act alike. Burke gave an honest attempt and Sir Kenneth Clarke attempted to apply such to a single narrow artistic subject: the nude in art, and even he was forced to admit that there were examples of nudes that were clearly great art (Rembrandt's Bathsheba, Courbet, etc... in which the actual figure in no way approached any ideal standard. What you say of the ideal stndards of female beauty undobtedly applies to Western history as well. In the late middle ages a high forehead (women cut back hair), small breasts and a rounded belly (a sign of fertility) was preferred and can be seen in paintings by Van Eyck. By the 17th century there was a preferrence for bodies of greater heft (proof of health, wealth and fertility once again) and Rubens, Rembrandt and other exemplified this look. Many have noted that Marilyn Monroe would be considered overweight by many of todays standards for actresses and models (although the woman was unquestionably stunning in Billy Wilder's great Some Like it Hot). Now the obsession seems to be for very thin bodies accompanied by floatation device breasts and botoxed lips. Certainly, standards ebb an flow. In art, admittedly, the preference for the classicism of Raphael, J.L. David, and Ingres was often at the exprense of the more turbulent, romantic, and contorted art such as that of the middle ages (hence the derrogatory term, "Gothic" as in "derrived from the Goths... Barbaric"). Our own time has often taken the exact opposite prejudice, preferring the more self-indulgent (Ginsberg, Plath, Sexton in poetry to the more refined classicism of Hecht and Wilbur.) I've always imagined l'art pour l'art as suggesting that we accpt... appreciate... value a work of art for what is is... that we base our critical judgements upon how good or bad it succeeds in what the artist attempts... rather than basing such judgements upon external values or expectations.
