"The prevailing view is that beauty is just much cream on the surface of things, the final icing of the cake. Actually Herbert Marcuse showed in his analysis of the philosophical history of the term, that view was fixed in the second half of the eighteenth century, about the time that scientific rationalism began "whittling down" the content and validity of aesthetic imagination. According to Marcuse, the sensuous realm of beauty - the realm of feeling - became relegated to the icefields of metaphysics, and what remained was mere appearance of a thing - the way it looked. But perhaps even more devastating that this stripping away of the content of beauty was the implicit repression of its actual validity by the claims of subjectivism. The result that , today, the average person assumes that not only does beauty have to do with just the appearance of things (and therefore an extravagance, to be added or subtracted as funds permit), but that it is also "subjective," a matter of personal taste or preference, and cannot be meaningfully discussed. And in this they have been supported by important philosophers, critics, and even artists who have come to the same conclusion. In summarizing this state of affairs, Guy Sircello points out how indeed it is almost impossible to discuss the subject objectively:

We hear from one side that the very search for necessary and sufficient conditions [of beauty] is perverse; from another that it is reckless and irresponsible because it will take the mystery and splendor out of our experience of the beautiful; from another that in making such a search we lose integrity because we are merely aping "science"; and from another that in trying to put soft, aesthetic notions on the same footing as hard, scientific concepts we are being presumptuous." /  p. 20,21 

I wonder now, can realism and subjectivism coexist,  or, can empiricism and subjectivism coexist? if so, how?