If a beautiful painting hung on the walls of museum of a planet which was uninhabited, is it beautiful?

Who has decided that it's beautiful, if no one has ever seen it?





Presumably it is, since an artist would have had to execute it in the first place, and if that has happened, then the painting has been seen by at least one person -- probably more, since it would have had to be transported to the uninhabited planet by someone and hung by that person; OR, it would have to be a relic of a lost civilization.





But beauty is beauty, whether or not it represents beauty to all cultures at all times. Let me put it this way: if a great painting by, say, Raphael, somehow survived a great cataclysm on earth and hung in the crumbling Vatican Museum for millennia before aliens showed up and found it, would it still be intrinsically beautiful?





Perhaps not to the aliens, not at first, and not according to their immediate understanding of beauty. But in an abstract, non-culturally specific sense, it would be. After all, today we value as ';beautiful'; many works of art from the past -- and past cultures -- that do not meet our contemporary western criteria of beauty. I suspect the aliens would do the same.





An interesting question in the Philosophy of Aesthetics.If a beautiful painting hung on the walls of museum of a planet which was uninhabited, is it beautiful?
Since nobody saw it, I don't think it's beautiful. It like when a tree falls and nobody's around to hear it fall, there was no sound.If a beautiful painting hung on the walls of museum of a planet which was uninhabited, is it beautiful?
Well, you described it as beautiful so we will have to take your word for it.
Yes, of course. God knew it was there and knew of it's beauty.