Apples - Rand on Still Life Paintings, Plus


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Jules Troy started a thread to showcase his photography - "My photography at Deviant Art."

One thing leading to another, the subject of Rand's views on photography came up, and from there a discussion of aesthetics ensued. See Jonathan's post #88 for the approximate start of that discussion.

Along the way, Rand's remarks about apples in a still life arose, and I commented (#128):

[....]

About the apple. I'm going to re-read that passage tonight. From memory, I think that what Rand says about the still-life and what she says about sculpture generally and about Rembrandt's side of beef specifically don't add up.

I'll type in Rand's remarks in the next posts.

Ellen

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Here's the passage in which Rand specifically talks about a still life of apples. I'll start with this passage, leaving out the build-up to it for now.

"Art and Cognition"

pp. 37-38, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the April-June 1971

issues of The Objectivist)

It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting - for example, a still life of apples - makes its subject "more real than reality." The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-assertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.

He has performed the process of concept-formation - of isolating and integrating - but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.

No one can perceive literally and indiscriminately every accidental, inconsequential detail of every apple he happens to see; everyone perceives and remembers only some aspects, which are not necessarily the essential ones; most people carry in mind a vaguely approximate image of an apple's appearance. The painting concretizes that image by means of visual essentials, which most men have not focused on or identified, but recognize at once. What they feel, in effect, is: "Yes, that's how an apple looks to me!" In fact, no apple ever looked that way to them - only to the selectively focused eye of an artist. But, psycho-epistemologically, their sense of heightened reality is not an illusion: it comes from the greater clarity which the artist has given to their mental image. The painting has integrated the sum of their countless random impressions, and thus has brought order to the visual field of their experience.

Apply the same process to the paintings of more complex subjects - of landscapes, of cities, of human figures, of human faces - and you will see the psycho-epistemological power of the art of painting.

Ellen

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Next, a passage about sculpture from the same essay.

"Art and Cognition"

pg. 40, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the April-June 1971

issues of The Objectivist)

Compared to painting, sculpture is a more limited form of art. It expresses an artist's view of existence through his treatment of the human figure, but it is confined to the human figure. (For a discussion of sculpture's means, I will refer you to "Metaphysics in Marble" by Mary Ann Sures, The Objectivist, February-March, 1969.)

Dealing with two senses, sight and touch, sculpture is restricted by the necessity to present a three-dimensional shape as man does not perceive it: without color. Visually, sculpture offers shape as an abstraction; but touch is a somewhat concrete-bound sense and confines sculpture to concrete entities. Of these, only the figure of man can project a metaphysical meaning. There is little that one can express in the statue of an animal or of an inanimate object.

Psycho-epistemologically, it is the requirements of the sense of touch that make the texture of a human body a crucial element in sculpture, and virtually a hallmark of great sculptors. Observe the manner in which the softness, the smoothness, the pliant resiliency of the skin is conveyed by rigid marble in such statues as the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo's Pietà.

It is worth noting that sculpture is almost a dead art. Its great day was in Ancient Greece which, philosophically, was a man-centered civilization. A Renaissance is always possible, but the future of sculpture depends to a large extent on the future of architecture. The two arts are closely allied; one of the problems of sculpture lies in the fact that one of its most effective functions is to serve as architectural ornament.

Ellen

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And next, Rand's put-down of Rembrandt's side of beef, with the build-up. This is from her essay "The Goal of My Writing."

"The Goal of My Writing"

pp. 158-60, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the October-November 1963

issues of "The Objectivist Newsletter")

I see the novelist as a combination of prospector and jeweler. The novelist must discover the potential, the gold mine, of man's soul, must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit.

Just as men of ambition for material values do not rummage through city dumps, but venture out into lonely mountains in search of gold - so men of ambition for intellectual values do not sit in their backyards, but venture out in quest of the noblest, the purest, the costliest elements. I would not enjoy the spectacle of Benvenuto Cellini making mud-pies.

It is the selectivity in regard to subject - the most severely, rigorously, ruthlessly exercised selectivity - that I hold as the primary, the essential, the cardinal aspect of art. In literature, this means: the story - which means the plot and the characters - which means: the kind of men and events that a writer chooses to portray.

The subject is not the only attribute of art, but it is the fundamental one, it is the end to which all the others are the means. In most esthetic theories, however, the end - the subject - is omitted from consideration, and only the means are regarded as esthetically relevant. Such theories set up a false dichotomy and claim that a slob portrayed by the technical means of a genius is preferable to a goddess portrayed by the technique of an amateur. I hold that both are esthetically offensive; but while the second is merely esthetic incompetence, the first is an esthetic crime.

There is no dichotomy, no necessary conflict between ends and means. The end does not justify the means - neither in ethics nor in esthetics. And neither do the means justify the end: there is no esthetic justification for the spectacle of Rembrandt's great artistic skill employed to portray a side of beef.

That particular painting may be taken as a symbol of everything I am opposed to in art and in literature. At the age of seven, I could not understand why anyone should wish to paint or to admire pictures of dead fish, garbage cans or fat peasant women with triple chins. Today, I understand the psychological causes of such esthetic phenomena - and the more I understand, the more I oppose them.

In art and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Ellen

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Next the maple leaf image Jonathan posted on Jules' photography thread, with the question Jonathan asked Tony.

Here's a painting:

13904641847_2c370dc020_o.jpg

Without knowing its creator's intentions, identify whether or not it is art. Objectively prove that it is art or that it is not art.

Ellen

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Another jibe at Rembrandt with a bit of a jibe at Vermeer - whom elsewhere, for instance in "Art and Cognition," Rand called the greatest painter, albeit with a reservation expressed about his choice of subjects. (See post #9.)

"Art and Sense of Life"

pp. 31-32, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the March 1966

issue of The Objectivist)

Style is the most complex element of art, the most revealing, and often the most baffling psychologically. The terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work. As an example: Salvador Dali, whose style projects the luminous clarity of a rational psycho-epistemology, while most (though not all) of his subjects project an irrational and revoltingly evil metaphysics. A similar, but less offensive, conflict may be seen in the paintings of Vermeer, who combines a brilliant clarity of style with the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism. At the other extreme of the stylistic continuum, observe the deliberate blurring and visual distortions of the so-called "painterly" school, from Rembrandt on down - down to the rebellion against consciousness, expressed by a phenomenon such as Cubism which seeks specifically to disintegrate man's consciousness by painting objects as man does not perceive them (from several perspectives at once).

Ellen

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Here are more images of super-evil art (as determined by the method used in Rand's Rembrandt tirade and Tony's leaf-death vision):

Dead, rotted fruit in bottles, consumed for the purpose of altering one's mind and escaping reality:
http://www.cordair.com/arvid/

Things that were once living but are now dead and/or dismembered:
http://www.cordair.com/gomez/

More death and mindless drunkenness:
http://www.cordair.com/rough/

Have a spoonful of death and frozen juices that were sucked from a cow, you sick fucking psycho:
http://www.cordair.com/rough/foreveronsundae.php

J

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Another jibe at Rembrandt with a bit of a jibe at Vermeer - whom elsewhere, for instance in "Art and Cognition," Rand called the greatest painter, albeit with a reservation expressed about his choice of subjects. (See the next post.)

"Art and Sense of Life"

pp. 31-32, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the March 1966

issue of The Objectivist)

Style is the most complex element of art, the most revealing, and often the most baffling psychologically. The terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work. As an example: Salvador Dali, whose style projects the luminous clarity of a rational psycho-epistemology, while most (though not all) of his subjects project an irrational and revoltingly evil metaphysics. A similar, but less offensive, conflict may be seen in the paintings of Vermeer, who combines a brilliant clarity of style with the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism. At the other extreme of the stylistic continuum, observe the deliberate blurring and visual distortions of the so-called "painterly" school, from Rembrandt on down - down to the rebellion against consciousness, expressed by a phenomenon such as Cubism which seeks specifically to disintegrate man's consciousness by painting objects as man does not perceive them (from several perspectives at once).

Ellen

As I asked Tony on the other thread, how do we test and verify anyone's opinion that Vermeer had a case of "bleak metaphysics" versus that the person giving the opinion is in error to the point of being laughably inept at visual aesthetics?

J

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Here's the (slightly hedged) compliment to Vermeer mentioned in post #6.

This passage follows directly after the quote from "Art and Cognition" given in post #2.

"Art and Cognition"

pp. 38-39, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the April-June 1971

issues of The Objectivist)

The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelationships feature, lead to and make possible the painting's brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.

(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer's work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.)

One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power - a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: "This is my view of life," the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.

As I have mentioned in "Art and Sense of Life," all the other elements of painting, such as theme, subject, composition, are involved in projecting an artist's view of existence, but for this present discussion, style is the most important element: it demonstrates in what manner an art confined to a single sense modality, using exclusively visual means, can express and affect the total of man's consciousness.

Ellen

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Someplace Rand says about the Rembrandt side of beef that it doesn't have enough information from which to identify a sense of life.

I don't remember where this comment appears. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate the reference.

Ellen

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http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1328446&user_id=27947&member&np

Second oil painting I ever attempted.. I know its a tad flat...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1163321&user_id=27947&member&np

This I created about 2002 in Bryce 4 on a p3 733 back thennnnn that render took 48 hours to antialias..I also created the metallic texture/bump map from scratch in the Bryce texture/materials editor that I applied to the figure. I don't really post there anymore as I am focused in photography but most likely will return to it sooner or later....cinema4d and zbrush. Sculpture is alive and well in cyberspace Ellen.

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Although Rand called Vermeer "the greatest of all artists" (meaning painters in the context, not artists generically), she objected to his choice of subjects - see post #9 - and said that Vermeer "combines a brilliant clarity of style with the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism" - see post #6.

The quote in post #6 comes from "Art and Sense of Life." A bit earlier in that essay, in the context of her discussing the function of an art work's "subject," Rand makes another negative reference to Vermeer.

"Art and Sense of Life"

pg. 30, The Romantic Manifesto,

Signet 1975 paperback Second Revised Edition

(originally published in the March 1966

issue of The Objectivist)

Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a work of art are the crucial means of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style - what an artist chooses to present and how he presents it.

The subject of an art work expresses a view of man's existence, while the style expresses a view of man's consciousness. The subject reveals an artist's metaphysics, the style reveals his psycho-epistemology.

The choice of subject declares what aspects of existence the artist regards as important - as worthy of being re-created and contemplated. He may choose to present heroic figures, as exponents of man's nature - or he may choose statistical composites of the average, the undistinguished, the mediocre - or he may choose crawling specimens of depravity. He may present the triumph of heroes, in fact or in spirit (Victor Hugo), or their struggle (Michelangelo), or their defeat (Shakespeare). He may present the folks next door: next door to palaces (Tolstoy), or to drugstores (Sinclair Lewis), or to kitchens (Vermeer), or to sewers (Zola). He may present monsters as objects of moral denunciation (Dostoevsky), or as objects of terror (Goya) - or he may demand sympathy for his monsters, and thus crawl outside the limits of the realm of values, including esthetic ones.

Whatever the case may be, it is the subject (qualified by the theme) that projects an art work's view of man's place in the universe.

Ellen

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"[T]he folks next door [...] to kitchens" and "the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism" - Rand re Vermeer.

I suppose that the "kitchens" comes from one of Vermeer's most famous - and I'd venture to guess, most loved - paintings: The Milkmaid.

Here and here are a couple sites where you can see an image. Maybe Jonathan can post one that would show up directly.

I love that painting's serene balance, the milkmaid's calm focus on her task, the glisten on the controlled stream of milk.

Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, lengthily describes the pouring of metal from the first heat of Rearden metal - the controlled stream coming from the huge ladle, the silken smile.

The pouring of a heat of metal is Romantic Realism.

The pouring of milk into a bowl is bleak Naturalsim.

Ellen

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Furthermore, a still life of apples can teach man how to see.

But the only form of statuary which can convey anything metaphysical is that of the human form.

And Rembrandt's side of beef has "no esthetic justification."

I cynically wonder if Rand's comments about a still life of apples were influenced by Frank's having painted such a still life.

Ellen

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Furthermore, a still life of apples can teach man how to see.

But the only form of statuary which can convey anything metaphysical is that of the human form.

And Rembrandt's side of beef has "no esthetic justification."

I cynically wonder if Rand's comments about a still life of apples were influenced by Frank's having painted such a still life.

Ellen

Rand's views on the arts are chock full of brazen double standards and contradictions. They're a mess of judgmental nonsense. It's an attitude of pure irrationality, total lack of actual knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity, along with the ridiculously arrogant assumption of authority and superiority. Many of her statements on visual art come across to me as stream of consciousness pronouncements that have no connection whatsoever to reality, and which make me wonder, "Did you even listen to yourself when you said that? Did you give it even a fraction of a second of critical thought? Were you stoned out of your mind at the time?"

J

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Sculpture is alive and well in cyberspace Ellen.

It really is. I've enjoyed making my own models for years, and was surprised when I discovered how many models -- of anything and everything -- already exist and are for sale online. And here and there I've seen even the fine art world being influenced by virtual sculpture.

J

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Next the maple leaf image Jonathan posted on Jules' photography thread, with the question Jonathan asked Tony.

Here's a painting:

13904641847_2c370dc020_o.jpg

Without knowing its creator's intentions, identify whether or not it is art. Objectively prove that it is art or that it is not art.

Ellen

It is a picture of a leaf. Other than being what it is, it convey's no message to me.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Sculpture is alive and well in cyberspace Ellen.

It really is. I've enjoyed making my own models for years, and was surprised when I discovered how many models -- of anything and everything -- already exist and are for sale online. And here and there I've seen even the fine art world being influenced by virtual sculpture.

J

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To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farmmaking use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's Renderman and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.[104][105][106][107] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta.[108][109] Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[110] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.[111] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.

As much as I do not like Cameron one cannot help but admire the creation of avatar. He had the story in his head for years. The technology was not there to create it. So he created what needed to be made in order to render and animate the entire world. That was freeking beyond impressive.

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To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farmmaking use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's Renderman and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.[104][105][106][107] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta.[108][109] Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[110] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.[111] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.

As much as I do not like Cameron one cannot help but admire the creation of avatar. He had the story in his head for years. The technology was not there to create it. So he created what needed to be made in order to render and animate the entire world. That was freeking beyond impressive.

To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farmmaking use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's Renderman and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.[104][105][106][107] The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta.[108][109] Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[110] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.[111] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.

As much as I do not like Cameron one cannot help but admire the creation of avatar. He had the story in his head for years. The technology was not there to create it. So he created what needed to be made in order to render and animate the entire world. That was freeking beyond impressive.

Avatar for me, was certainly impressive. I enjoyed the visuals, the color. Those involved in using (understanding) the technology also get a salute from me.

It certainly wasn't like using Microsoft Word or Mac Pages, as engrossing as they are.

-Joe

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Rand's views on the arts are chock full of brazen double standards and contradictions. They're a mess of judgmental nonsense. It's an attitude of pure irrationality, total lack of actual knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity, along with the ridiculously arrogant assumption of authority and superiority. Many of her statements on visual art come across to me as stream of consciousness pronouncements that have no connection whatsoever to reality, and which make me wonder, "Did you even listen to yourself when you said that? Did you give it even a fraction of a second of critical thought? Were you stoned out of your mind at the time?"

J

Putting related comments from different essays in a string makes easy to see how all over the place they are.

A potpourri of pronouncements.

When I get a chance, I want to go after Rand's thesis that "aesthetic abstractions" are formed according to the criterion of what's "important," but I might not get a chance for awhile.

Ellen

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Rand's views on the arts are chock full of brazen double standards and contradictions. They're a mess of judgmental nonsense. It's an attitude of pure irrationality, total lack of actual knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity, along with the ridiculously arrogant assumption of authority and superiority. Many of her statements on visual art come across to me as stream of consciousness pronouncements that have no connection whatsoever to reality, and which make me wonder, "Did you even listen to yourself when you said that? Did you give it even a fraction of a second of critical thought? Were you stoned out of your mind at the time?"

J

Putting related comments from different essays in a string makes easy to see how all over the place they are.

A potpourri of pronouncements.

When I get a chance, I want to go after Rand's thesis that "aesthetic abstractions" are formed according to the criterion of what's "important," but I might not get a chance for awhile.

Ellen

Here's Rand on "esthetic abstractions" (from the online AR Lexicon):

There are many special or “cross-filed” chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion.

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

An artist does not fake reality—he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality—they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts. His selection constitutes his evaluation: everything included in a work of art—from theme to subject to brushstroke or adjective—acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included, of being important enough to include.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of Ancient Greece) who presents man as a god-like figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man—and he presents a figure embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man’s proper, natural state.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of the Middle Ages) who presents man as a deformed monstrosity is aware of the fact that there are men who are healthy, happy or confident; but he regards these conditions as accidental or illusory, as irrelevant to man’s essential nature—and he presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man’s proper, natural state.

Perhaps I need to reread more from the original source so as to grasp the full context, but the first questions that pop into mind are: Is this a new concept that Rand is acknowledging to be inventing, or is she claiming that it has implicitly existed since the time that people began creating art? Is Rand suggesting that her notion of "esthetic abstractions" is the essence and limit of aesthetics, or that it is only a part of aesthetics? Is she suggesting that art, by definition, must include "esthetic abstractions," or only that it might or may include them?

The first possible criticisms that come to mind are: What proof is there to support this notion of "esthetic abstractions"? Which items of possible disproof did Rand consider and address? What reason is there to believe that any artists other than Rand believed that their art must be limited to addressing things of "metaphysical" importance? Is this notion of "esthetic abstraction" the result of a logically natural, free inquiry into the nature of art and human response/taste, or is it heavily influenced by certain irrational predetermined conclusions, such as the desire to make aesthetic judgments "objective" even though they are not (they do not follow Rand's method of volitionally applying logical and reason using a clearly defined standard of judgment)?

As for the last two paragraphs above, they are Rand's personal, subjective interpretations of examples of art, and inappropriate attempts to use art as a Rorschach test. They are collectivized generalizations. Where is Rand's proof that she hasn't shallowly misinterpreted the art and what its creators believed?

Why did Rand choose to contrast art of Ancient Greece with that of the Middle Ages, and why did she collectivistically caricaturize both as being one thing or another, when the truth is that all periods and schools of art have contained heroes and monsters, good versus evil, including Rand's own art? Where did she get this need to arbitrarily ignore individuality and to make collective condemnations which don't hold up in reality?

It sounds to me as if a theory was hastily concocted, and then the idea became to try to pound square reality into the round hole.

(Let's apply the same method to Rand's work: The majorities of the populations of her novels are crippled, diseased, helpless and deformed monstrosities embodying pain, ugliness and terror, and only a few rare exceptions are strong, beautiful, intelligent and self-confident. So, by her formulation, she must have viewed mankind as being essentially nasty, with health and heroism being freak accidents of nature. Slimy villains and filthy masses of mindless, intellectually indifferent, murky gray people must have been her view of mankind's proper, natural state since she thought them as important enough to include so prominently in all of her art.)

J

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[paragraph breaks and numbers added]

Perhaps I need to reread more from the original source so as to grasp the full context, but the first questions that pop into mind are:

[1] Is this a new concept that Rand is acknowledging to be inventing, or is she claiming that it has implicitly existed since the time that people began creating art?

[2] Is Rand suggesting that her notion of "esthetic abstractions" is the essence and limit of aesthetics, or that it is only a part of aesthetics?

[3] Is she suggesting that art, by definition, must include "esthetic abstractions," or only that it might or may include them?

Answers:

[1] The latter, she's claiming that it is and always has been what people were doing in art.

[2] She's saying that her notion is the essence and limit.

[3] She's saying that art must include "esthetic abstractions" (hence anything that doesn't isn't art).

Ellen

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Perhaps I need to reread more from the original source so as to grasp the full context [...].

I'll refresh your memory as to how the article starts. It's the one titled "Art and Sense of Life," originally published in The Objectivist, March 1966.

It's the one which begins with the painting of a beautiful woman with a cold sore.

[A] painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values - and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist.)

More in awhile.

Ellen

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