One crazy_idea I once had was to mine popular paintings and phottographs for aestetic patterns and derive (properties of) an synthetic optimum picture from that.

Not crazy enough -- people have done that :-) I don't have links handy, but there was at least one project which merged pictures of attractive women to create an "average-pretty" face -- it may have been culture specific, that is, they repeated this exercise for pictures of women considered attractive in different countries. As far as I remember, the end result was a predictable meh.