A Beholder's Eye on Beauty

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? If such were the case than beauty must be relative and not something intrinsically absolute.

Neil Diamond in his song Be cries out, "Lost. On a painted sky, where the clouds are hung for the poets eye..." Is this really the case? Certainly some are more capable of greater eloquence where beauty is concerned but the appreciation of a cloud-filled sky must affect everyone. Due to our familiarity with the heavens this appreciation has been cheapened until it makes even the sublime a commonplace occurance. Or, as Tozer noted, "It was Emerson who commented that if the stars should come out only one night in a thousand years, everyone would drop what he or she was doing and in awe 'look at the shining city of God.' But because we see them all the time and because we are busy, we pay very little attention to the stars." (Men Who Met God)

Does beauty uphold itself by some absolute standard or must it be held up (or put down) by particular standards? One of my teachers once challenged me to become more discerning on what is taste and what is good taste. Simply because I have a taste for something does not make that something necessarily "good." Of course by this sense of goodness I am not referring to righteousness or any spiritually related goodness but only the goodness of a standard, such as those belonging to high society. We all have our little quirks, idiosyncrasies and such which distinguish us from the rest of society. Of course, we are often not as quirky as we'd like to think. There are more people like us out there than we'd care to admit, yet not all of us have good taste. We may, it's true, have both, or, more probably, a little of each, but still we must discern between the two and actively pursue both.