Have you seen gods, the good ones and even the bad ones, ever portrayed in paintings, sculptures, etc., as ugly/grotesque? To behold beauty is to catch a glimpse, albeit transitory, of the gods themselves.

Ugliness represents reality as we know it (merciless, ruthless, cruel - deformations of the gods' inherent perfect proportions). I'm myself aesthetically-challenged; take what I say here as a form of self-analysis/self-deprecation and not as a case of lookism.

I don't think beauty contains inherent virtue.

When it comes to a beautiful face it seems obvious that it is beautiful, but the longer I look at it the more plain and normal it starts to seem. — TiredThinker

Have you spent extended time looking at a face you deemed to be ugly?

Lol. No. But certainly our reactions are stronger when they have certain more extreme qualities.

some beaty is immediately arresting and other forms involve a measure of time to glimpse.
in Homer, realizing that one is present before a god was oddly piecemeal.
that neck does not fit. why are the sounds so harmonious?

ugly is bound up with time and circumstance too. but in a different way.

Aesthetics is really hard. My initial idea is that the "beautiful", either a human face, a song or a painting is related more intimately with something positive than merely speaking about the absence of ugliness.

Absence of ugliness would lead me to think of neutrality, instead of beauty.

Of course, we add "more to what is actually there" in almost everything. What a human being considers a beautiful face may be (to some extent) subjective and obviously not shared by a squirrel or a cat. What is beautiful is something which excites that inner part of us that finds beauty in things.

Babies respond more positively to traditionally beautiful face before a time when they presumably associate different faces with positive or negative things.

As far as evolution anyway we tend to prefer symmetry and other basic characteristics to rule out those with disease which essentially makes those uglier. It still seems beauty is largely a subjective add on judgement of our imagination while ugliness has more objective features. I don't know if a true neutral exists?

Yes that's true. Though as you suggest, we don't know if it's something specifically beautiful about the faces or some other factor. Babies might have more base reactions such as pleasant or unpleasant before they develop an idea as complex as beauty. Maybe.

Well, there are those arguments from symmetry, which seem common-sensical more than evolutionary, but I'm not sure that says much.

Neutral faces? I suppose these are cases of closer to neutral or further away. But I was replying to the idea that beauty being the lack of ugliness. It seems to me beauty is something positive.

Lol. No. But certainly our reactions are stronger when they have certain more extreme qualities. — TiredThinker

Can't beauty be considered an "extreme"? You see an extremely beautiful face, but the more you regard it, the plainer it gets. Why not regard an "extremely" ugly face for awhile and see if this changes your suppositions?

The beautiful I think is the perfection of form and function, the two must necessarily play off one another, the ugly is when the essence of creation has missed the mark in one way or another. We've all heard that there is no such thing as perfection, but the closer one comes to it the more pleasing the form and function of the subject. Art I believe is a celebration of being, something which emerges from the cosmos, but the farther away the subject is from the perfection of form and function the more it leans towards none existence. The beautiful is the quality of being, even in the mating game, there is an on going trading of qualities of being, qualities subconsciously involved in the process of fulfilling the will of the species, form, function, and health being the most obvious of commodities.

I don't think beauty contains inherent virtue. — TiredThinker

I wouldn't be so certain about that. As I said, the two (good & beauty) have been wedded together ab antiquo. Representations of gods/goddesses have always been aesthetically pleasing.

Too, biologically speaking, handsomeness is a marker of reproductive health i.e. comeliness is viewed as life-promoting (vide creator deity).

Then there's attractiveness as a quality to live up to. Wouldn't it be absolutely fabulous to be a looker and also morally upright? Vide infra.

The Greek philosopher Socrates, of "know thyself" fame, urged young people to look at themselves in mirrors so that, if they were beautiful, they would become worthy of their beauty, and if they were ugly, they would know how to hide their disgrace through learning. — Wikipedia

Ugliness leads to beauty; beauty leads to ugliness. Too much beauty is like consuming too much sugar; too much ugliness is like consuming too much vinegar. They dance with one another, play off one another, and inform one another; they make one another. The one often becomes the other and vice versa. Christmas jingles become ugly in time. Doom metal dirges become beautiful in time. The perception of the viewer/listener/etc changes over time, and so perception of the quality of the content changes over time. Age plays a role. Experience plays a role. Desire, nostalgia, prejudice and regret play roles. The older one gets the less one understands beauty, and the less one holds unto the concept. Ugliness becomes a smile. Beauty begins to provoke feelings of uncertainty. Philosophical questions regarding the concepts begin to fade. Experience broadens and deepens. Questions broaden and deepen.

Does no one here appreciate that beauty is the refinement of form and function, beauty is found to be so because it speaks to the order of being, the order of your own being. We are strongly affected by this concept of beauty even on a subconscious level. We know that the more attractive, the more beautiful one is, one is treated better than the less attractive individual. Uglyness does not lead to beauty, uglyness leads to monstrosities, and monstrosities lead to death, none existence. That is why I say that art is a celebration of being, all of life's being. With Form and function even the environment passes judgement here, in the form of natural seledtion, poor form leads to poor function and extinction through natural selection. Well it is true that there is more potental in chaos, chaos is not what we find beautiful we find order beautiful in being, it speaks to a world's content, that which is becoming and that which is receding away, the beauty of youth and that declining of beauty we call old age.

When it comes to a beautiful face it seems obvious that it is beautiful, but the longer I look at it the more plain and normal it starts to seem. An ugly face gives a much stronger more visceral repulsive feeling. Perhaps a beautiful face isn't so much beautiful, but undefinable and plain and we intellectually add in our minds more than is actually there? — TiredThinker

Consider the difference between happiness and gratification. the latter comes and goes. The former is abiding. Beauty possessed by an object is, I think, a contradiction to this, for the beauty of the object is a finite rapture, happiness reduced to objectivity, not merely a gratification (which we associate with food, sex, amusement, and so on).

There is something about the rapture of beauty this reminds me of Hegel: to see the beauty is to recognize something profound with yourself, something, I would add, that exceeds the desire to a measure that refuses to be finitized.

Beauty is definitely a preset ideal we hold, as we search and strive for it in almost all things. Uglyness evokes such a reaction because we understand that it is an obstruction, a degeneration of a form

we intellectually add in our minds more than is actually there? — TiredThinker

Of course we do. Our appraisal of something as beautiful is a property of our minds, not the thing. But we project this into the thing.