That beauty is not relative in the sense in which you mean it

An acquaintance, who reads more than he looks (and too much reading is not a good thing: it takes up time one might instead spend looking, or licking), jumped on me when I explained something about a 16th century textile technique – that a certain apparently odd effect was in fact produced intentionally. These are culturally determined preferences, he said, and they are not stable overtime! (Thinking, obviously, that tastes have changed, etc).

He was of course wrong, as wrong as are all aesthetic theoreticians who do not know about technique.

What is desirable in a technique – such as a textile technique – is not determined by place or age or religon or fashion, but by the limitations of the technique itself. Perfectly round circles are the most desirable shapes in double-ikat because they are the hardest thing to do; washes are repeatedly explored in mordant dying because in it precision is not possible at all; precision in fencai is highly valued because it is so hard to achieve (and possible); as is uniform color in sang-de-boef; transparency is valued in porcelain, as is thin shape, because it is the only pottery in the world which can achieve both – one needn’t kaolin clay to make thick, heavy, and opaque pots; therefore working in kaolin, one doesn't.

All these examples show that beauty -- and the aesthetic judgment of goodness or badness in general -- is automatically built into the technique, it emerges out of it. Mary Mothersill once said that but no one believed her because her examples were lousy.

Beauty is relative only to the technique, or, better said, genre, that is to say, what is beautiful in double-ikat is not what is beautiful in qalamkari. Just as what is beautiful in a tall, buxom blonde is not what is beautiful in a petite brunette. They are different, incomparable things.