Beautiful: humans, flowers, orchids, bumble bees, butterflies, ladybirds, birds of paradise, big cats...
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!
>Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time.
To be clear, I think you're claiming:
1. beauty _is_ objective
2. this beauty-is-subjective thing is a recent phenomenon
I disagree with both of those claims, but the second one is more interesting to me. At least in the 1700's some people believed that beauty is subjective [1]. But perhaps you consider the 1700's recent?
Ugly: most other insects, maggots, spiders, deep sea fish, proboscis monkeys, lampreys...
Thinking that some ugly creatures aren't ugly, or that beauty isn't real and objective, is part of of the aesthetic inversion of our time. It's the same phenomenon which put toilets and unmade beds into art galleries.
None of this implies that we can't disagree about specific cases, or that beauty is easy to define, or that we shouldn't treat animals well!