I did a little digging and found this:

The proverb, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder‘ is attributed to Margaret Hungerford who was an Irish novelist.Hungerford lived between 1855 and 1897, and she tended to write using a pen name: ‘The Duchess’. In her novel ‘Molly Bawn’ (her most well known book), she included the idiom ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder‘.

Plato said something similar, but the Hungerford quote was the one I was looking for.

In our basement my wife put up a painting and I really dislike it. To her, it matches everything nicely and she likes it.

To me it isn’t art.

I’m not opposed to abstract art. There are abstract paintings I can appreciate, and like. But to me this isn’t art. It’s visual noise. It feels more like a distraction than an attraction. I don’t see an artist expressing themselves, I see a mess of paint on a canvas.

While I believe beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, I also think art has an innate beauty. I can look at a photograph and tell you that it is good, or I can tell you that it is poorly composed, or that it is beautiful even if the subject matter isn’t.

I think abstract art is like that too, and I think this painting was not done by a good artist, or even if it was, it certainly wasn’t one of their best works. I’ve threatened to paint over it. My wife isn’t amused.

If you know an abstract artist (and you admire their work), please ask them what they think of this painting without an explanation first. I’m interested to see if they agree that this isn’t good art, or if it’s simply true that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and I’m simply not beholden to the beauty of this piece.