"Beauty" is an aesthetic concept of the mind that varies between each person, not a property that you can give to an object. The object is beautiful because its perceiver finds it to be so; without the perceiver, there is no beauty. Therefore, it is a mistake to talk about beauty as an intrinsic property ("X is beautiful") when it is actually a perception ("Jim finds X beautiful.").

When we say "X is beautiful", it is actually shorthand for "Lots of people find X beautiful", or "The consensus is that X is found to be beautiful".

/aspie

'"Beauty" is an aesthetic concept of the mind that varies between each person, not a property that you can give to an object.'

Not everyone would agree to this. There are people who believe that objective beauty really is "out there" in the world, independent of human judgement.

Your opinion is very fashionable at the moment, particularly among academics and intellectuals, and similar arguments are applied to morality and anything else not subject to empirical investigation. But as I said, this way of thinking is by no means universal.

But what, other than intelligent beings, can ponder the concept of beauty? When we say something is beautiful, we mean it is aesthetically pleasing, and without a perceiver of an object, there is nothing to be aesthetically pleased.

If you believe in god, space aliens, etc., we can shift the admirer of beauty to another perceiver, but still, without the perceiver there is no concept of beauty ascribed to the object.

If I like ugly things, great. I can find art I enjoy for cheap.

People are weirdly insecure about their taste in visual art. Nobody worries "Uh-oh, what if I like music that's actually bad?" I guess at least with bad music, you feel like you have company. If you're into Eminem you'll meet other people with Eminem T-shirts, but you don't see people with Thomas Kinkade or Jeff Koons T-shirts.