What is Beauty?

Yesterday I received an email, forwarded to me by one of my best friends, about a world famous violinist who played for 45 minutes at a Washington D.C. metro stop. For his efforts, he got $32 worth of donations, some of it in pennies. Most passersby didn't stop, didn't appear to listen, didn't care. I was astounded by this little piece because it's an idea that's been in my head for a long time -- this actual idea about a famous musician playing in a subway station -- and here it was written out and being passed around the Internet. I learned that the email snippet originated in an article in The Washington Post . It was written by Gene Weingarten, a Times staff writer, and to my utter chagrin, I learned tht it had won a Pulitzer Prize. How could I have missed a Pulitzer-Prize winning article on a topic that had already captured my imagination? I have no idea. At any rate, it's a spectacular piece of writing about an amazing experiment. It all happened more than a year ago; I obviously missed it then. Thanks to Internet forwarding, I got it now -- and I'm not letting it go! There are so many fascinating things to say about this idea, this article and this experiment, and I will be trying to say some of them over my next few posts.

First....the basic question. IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD? Here's how Weingarten frames it near the start of his piece:

"It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?"

So...what do you think? If you're someone invovled in a creative act of any kind -- knitting, sewing, beading, writing, movie-making -- what is your definition of beauty?