When I was really loud on Twitter early on trying to get my name out as much as possible as a young, new-to-the-scene commentator on golf courses in Canada, I was very vocal about trying to separate the views/surrounding areas from the golf course, arguing that if a golf course was great, it would stand on its own two-feet, opening tee shot to final putt.
The funny thing about that was, I was a big Banff Springs and Jasper Park Lodge guy, as most people are, and spoke highly about how Thompson mimicked the peaks of the mountains in his bunkering! The irony.
I think I took this stance in response to my disgust for places like Stewart Creek and Chateau Whistler (among many other abysmal mountain courses in Western Canada) because I largely couldn't really articulate what the issue was. I, personally, felt the views of the mountains and how frequently the newer mountain golf courses gave you a "wow" tee shot based on views or severity downhill. These places were always ranked pretty highly (To this day, Stewart Creek is comfortably top 50 in Canada on SCORE's list, but barely made the Beyond The Contour Top 100), and I always felt like they were relying far too heavy on scenery, location, setting—whatever you want to call it. The golf courses are fine, but the shaping and actual golf portion lacked any real effort to making it not look like it was a man-made effort.
I still feel that way—that a great golf course stands on its own from the opening swing to the closing putt—but it's hard to put aside the setting of Pebble Beach or Banff Springs, because, well, that's a core part of the golf courses. The constant criticism that we wouldn't talk about Pebble if it was a corn field in Iowa with a huge depression as the ocean seems silly (would Herbert Strong have extended the 18th at Pebble if it was simply a chasm in the prairies???).
With that said, I think the word I was looking for is a sense of place. Chateau Whistler and Stewart Creek and any other example really fail to tie into their surrounds... there's zero sense of place on those golf courses and look so forced into the landscape that it's an eyesore at times. Places like Banff Springs, in contrast, tie into their surrounding environments very well, and they don't feel nearly as out of place as the above examples. Even something like Sagebrush, for as hilly as it is and closer in property characteristics to Chateau Whistler/Stewart Creek, feels like it's been there for far longer than it has been.
Which is where the artistic/beauty side comes into it. I've yet to play a golf course that I really liked that I thought wasn't attractive to the eye, largely because the best golf courses are so seamless into their surroundings and utilize the elements of the site that make them unique. Banff Springs and Pebble Beach are easy options to use as examples because they are SO pretty simply because of their settings (but the architecture does a good job highlighting that, also, with the 7th at Pebble and 4 at Banff being obvious inclusions to showcase the site's attributes), but a place like Rawls course in Lubbock, Texas or Hooper in New Hampshire also do a good job of fitting into their respective landscapes and don't forcefully contradict nature (Rawls moved a LOT of dirt moved but hard to tell).
It would be hard for a really good golf course to be ugly, in my opinion, because nature isn't ugly, and generally great golf courses do nearly everything well, not just one or two things. Even something like Muirfield, which is very low-profile and lacks any true visual stimulation, is gorgeous in the wind with the fescue dancing and the stone walls and looking to the water. That, and when Muirfield gets crazy on the bunkering like short-right of the 12th, it is really beautiful.
There is a functional element of tie-ins and bunkering style and all the nitty-gritty that goes into building a golf course that we, as consumers, take for granted, but there's also a beauty element to getting all that stuff right, too, so the golf course looks good, and the surrounding area looks good, also.
Bringing it back to the opening paragraph, a younger me might argue that the playing characteristics are the only thing that matters—strategy, options, green complexes, etc—but great golf courses deliver on nearly every aspect of the experience, and so I'd say it's a big deal to get the beauty of a golf course right. For some, that might be living up to the site's beauty a la Cypress Point or Jasper Park; in other instances, it might be creating beauty and having it fit into the landscape—but either way, it's a big deal.