My question is: Why can judgements of skill be correct or incorrect, but not judgements of beauty?
I think that the primary feature setting beauty apart from skill is the absence of a consensus on the particular non-aesthetic features which constitute it. An individual person may have very precise ideas about the nature and composition of beauty, but they would be hard pressed, I think, to find many others who agreed with them down to the most detailed level. Skill, on the other hand, is characterised by the same features for many, probably most, people. Such features include amount of requisite effort, ability to render details precisely, originality, popularity, and others. Popularity (over an extended period of time, and allowing for different amounts of exposure for different works) is, in my opinion, something of a measure of skill because it seems that a large portion of humanity agrees in a rather vague manner upon certain features which are beautiful. This is most likely due to the fact that all humans do share some similarities simply by virtue of being humans, and amongst these similarities may lie a very blurry, non-universal, yet noticeable consistency in aesthetic taste.
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