Is artistic judgement merely subjective opinion?

        Our cultural paradigm also plays an important role in our subjective artistic judgments. This happens as our minds are constantly influenced by our religions and cultures, thus affecting our personal taste and likings. An example of this would be people living in a country whose main religion is Buddhism would tend to prefer the painting of a Buddha while a Christian would prefer a painting of Christ Jesus. This shows that our religious and cultural background plays an important part in our artistic judgment, as it forms our point of view of art.

        Although it may seem that artistic judgments are based on subjective opinions, there are evidences that objective opinions are present in our artistic judgments. The article “Is ‘beauty’ just ‘biology’?” has research showing that humans sub-consciously have unanimous preferences for beauty. In the article, it states that there are certain features like body symmetry that affects the attractiveness of humans. It also states that even babies, who unlike adults, are not affected by paradigms, tend to stare longer at photos of people who are considered to be attractive by adults. This shows that the human mind has a sub-conscious preference for beauty, and this preference related to the object’s features. Thus this links us back to our artistic judgment, which is also affected by our human preferences in terms of its beauty. This gives evidence that there are also some objective opinions in our artistic judgment. Hence, artistic judgment is not merely on subjective opinions but also based on objective opinions.