“Beauty is a very difficult word: I have already complained about not being able to approach it straight on. People don’t use the word as freely as they used to, and many artists – painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, poets – reject it entirely; they deny that there is any common standard by which to judge it; they diminish it to mean prettiness and so righteously despise it; or they deliberately abandon it for truth, or self-expression, or edginess, or other values they prize more highly.
I don’t pretend to be able to argue with such refusals of beauty when I can’t even offer a generally acceptable definition of the word. But I think it behooves artists to consider what the word means to them, no matter what it means to others. How do they interpret the aesthetic component of what they do, its importance, its weight? What, besides that component, makes it appropriate to call their work art? What, besides the search to make something beautiful, makes an artist? There are perhaps as many answers to those questions now as there are artists, and nothing gives me the right to ask them of others, but I do feel the obligation to ask them of myself, and answer as honestly as I can.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin