The objective part of beauty of man made artifacts

(Being another note on Mothersill's Beauty Restored).

Mothersill does have some very good ideas, though. For example, this one: that the principles of goodness of a particular art form are built into the technology its practice. With respect to tea-vessels this means two different things:

1. The practice of drinking tea: tea pots and tea cups must fulfill certain criteria, such as: be thin enough not to cause the tea to cool; yet strong enough to withstand a certain degree of rough handling; the size must satisfy the requirements of the occasion: a relatively small pot if there are only 2 drinkers; cups -- small enough, and shaped in a manner which both prevents the tea from cooling too quickly and affords an easy way to handle them without burning one's fingers; they must also be easy to drink from (they should not, for example, be either square or triangular as has lately been the fashion); their appearance and decoration must also match the occasion, whether formal or informal. Etc.

2. The practice of pottery: this means, first, how well the vessels fulfill the requirements of point 1 above given the limitations of the potting technique, and the mechanical properties of clay and glaze; and, second, that superior potters and decorators (who are sometimes one and the same) try to display their skills with that kind of virtuosity which undertakes to perform well precisely what is most difficult to achieve in the particular technique. For instance, crackling is notoriously difficult to control during firing; for this reason, the crackleware with regular crackling is the most valuable.

There are other considerations, of course. Some may arise out of the cultural context, such as: is the color-scheme pleasing to the eye, given what we are used to seeing? Others may rely on hard-wired perceptions, e.g. is the shape graceful? But the two sets of considerations described above form a great deal of that part of evaluation of the quality of pottery which is really objective. One learns it as one learns anything; wrong or mistaken judgments are obviously wrong and can be objectively criticized and corrected.