Holy fucking shit. I just wrote 30 min worth of response to this and then lost it when I changed tabs to make sure I had the spelling of "hwaet" down. I am the shell of a man right now.

To whit: language is imperfect, and not the best way of getting at beauty, but it's still effective and we can still use current cultural tools to interpret past tools and in turn re-draw the beauty behind past works. I don't, however, ultimately believe that art requires an audience to be art, it simply requires a creator. those paintings in the caves in France, they were just as beautiful when they were buried behind slag as they are now. And no, we can't always divine artistic intent, but the most effective art exhibits its fundamental attributes independently of authorial intent. Has a life of its own.

On that note, yes, I do believe that everything is inherently beautiful, and that all art gets at that, although not all art gets at it effectively. But that potency relies less on our current understanding of a work and more on the craftsman's ability to convey beauty DESPITE cultural rifts, not BECAUSE of them. That's why there are still works from many disparate cultures that we still agree upon as "beautiful" today, even if the cultural division is vast. For that matter, Homer got through all of The Odyssey without using the descriptor "blue". Still a great work despite his inability to draw upon a relatively new word to describe a concept that wasn't yet in his cultural/physical lexicon.

Goddamn, the first response really was more elegant than that, but this'll have to do, since I have to leave for work. Art it ain't.