Why are Flowers Beautiful12
The prevailing view among both artists and non-artists is, I think, that there is nothing objective about artistic standards. Beauty, says the adage, is in the eye of the beholder. The very phrase 'It's a matter of taste' is used interchaneably with 'There is no objective truth of the matter.' Artistic standards are, in this view, nothin more than artefacts of fashion and other cultural accidents, or of individual whim, or of biological predisposition. Many are willing to concede that in science and mathematics one idea can be objectively truer than another (though, as we have seen, some deny even that), but most insist that there is no such thing as one object being objectively more beautiful than another.
A summary
If you are an artist and halfway through creating a work of art you see something in it that you want to bring out, then you are being attracted by a beauty that you have not yet experienced. You are being attracted by the idea of a piece of art before you have created it.
It is related to curiosity (novelty, unpredictability, uncertainty), the rewarding of creation and understanding.
New art is unpredictable, like new scientific discoveries. Is that the unpredictability of randomness, or the deeper unknowability of knowledge-creation? In other words, is art truly creative, like science and mathematics? ... And art, though acknowledged as 'creative', has often been seen as the antithesi of science, and hence irrational, random, inexplicable - and hence unjudgeable, and non-objective.
The need to create objective knowledge in order to allow different people to communicate.