[cmendel]

This is an interesting point of view that I hadn't considered before. Thank you for making this argument. How do you square your ideas with musical genres like dubstep, likely not the best example but the one that springs to mind, that lack some or all of these features and are still beloved by a subset of the population?

Would the variance in taste not imply that beauty itself is subjective?

[geocanuck]

Thanks for the kind response. I would say that variance in taste or popularity does not imply beauty at all. Something can be popular but not beautiful. Just because something is popular does not make it beautiful. People liking lots of different things does not imply that all these things are beautiful or that beauty is subjective, relative or meaningless.