Awesome Heroic Sculpture by Living Artist

[Ellen Stuttle]

[Yikes; I thought it was Jonathan {who coined "Objectikitsch"}, and quite awhile back. Sorry, Dragonfly. So where/when did you coin it?]

Here, and I used the term here (see here how popular the "head thrown backwards" posture is in this kind of paintings, and see also the absurd steroid monster by Gaetano) and recently here.

Hm; so now I wonder if it was an independent coinage, because, honest, I was using the term conversationally well before OL ever started. Maybe Dan Ust used it on Atlantis; or Jeff Olson is another plausible "suspect." (Ah, well, one of those mysteries: Where did I first hear it? I don't think I thought of it myself.)

Ellen

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[Kat]

I know I'm coming to the party late but I just wanted to say I like the statue. It reminds me of some of the works I saw at the National Gallery in DC a couple of years ago when they had an exhibit of monumental sculptures of the renaissance.

This piece is very powerful and the power seems to be coming from within the figure, not from summoning an outside source. He is tapping into his own resources. This man is not weak. I think that it has something to do with the hand gesture. Is there something significant with the way his hands are positioned? Any symbolism there?

kat

[Dragonfly]

Hm; so now I wonder if it was an independent coinage, because, honest, I was using the term conversationally well before OL ever started. Maybe Dan Ust used it on Atlantis; or Jeff Olson is another plausible "suspect." (Ah, well, one of those mysteries: Where did I first hear it? I don't think I thought of it myself.)

That must be one of those false memories...

[Jonathan]

I -- of course ;-) -- would say "of course not." But the universalized "essence" notion has become attached to that statue. I hope you understood it isn't the statue which bothers me but the linkage with the title.

I understood. My question was aimed at York's thoughts, not yours, since she does appear to believe that the sculpture must represent Rodin's view of the essence of all thinking, and, for that matter, the essence of existing. It makes me wonder how she would interpret Newberry's "Rend" (sorry for continuing to use that particular example, but, as everyone knows, I've had a big crush on Newbsy for years, and I can't help myself). Surely she must believe that Newberry thinks that agony is existence -- that man was made to do nothing but suffer.

I see nothing to disagree with in the comments you made. Notice, though, that you at least 3 times (I counted 3 times) used the description "pondered" for what's depicted by the pose. Pondering is a type of thinking; but it isn't the whole category. I find the association between the title and the pose too wide -- and one which casts a painful aura, a quality of struggle, on the whole range of "thinking." I doubt that I'd have had troubles with that statue if he'd titled it, per my suggestion, "The Ponderer" or something else which doesn't universalize -- and if the statue hadn't so very often been taken as the "quintessential" image of thinking. (E.g., I've seen photos of it time and time again in universities as a kind of "icon" of "thought." I don't like that iconic linkage.)

I agree that "pondering" is a better word to describe what the figure is doing, but I don't think that an artwork's title needs to be a perfect description of the art. It doesn't need to essentialize or represent the art, and a word chosen as title shouldn't be taken to imply that the artwork is a sort of visual definition of the entire category that the word represents. Personally, the mere sound of the word "ponderer" would be enough to dissuade me from using it as a title, even if it were more descriptive than "thinker." To me it lacks the simple elegance of "thinker." I'd go with something like "Figure 26" before "The Ponderer." From what I've seen of others' opinions of the The Thinker, I've gotten the impression that they see it as representing deep thinking, but, you could be correct that it has become something of an icon to a lot of people for the essence of all thinking.

J

PS - While obsessively daydreaming about my little Newbsy Woobsy today, I decided to visit his site, and, while looking through his archive, I was reminded of how much I enjoy this beautiful image of a thinker/creator:

http://www.newberryarchive.com/node/621

(and Newbsy says that never praise him or his work!)

[Jonathan]

Hm; so now I wonder if it was an independent coinage, because, honest, I was using the term conversationally well before OL ever started. Maybe Dan Ust used it on Atlantis; or Jeff Olson is another plausible "suspect." (Ah, well, one of those mysteries: Where did I first hear it? I don't think I thought of it myself.)

I thought that DF had used the term on RoR back before we were tagged as dirty dog dissenters.

J

[Jonathan]

I think that it has something to do with the hand gesture.

I like the hands as well, despite not liking the sculpture as a whole.

J

[Philip Coates]

> That problem is much more widespread than amongst Objectivists...My teachers ...complaining of diminishing standards....When you have people entering as physics majors who can't even add and subtract (let alone write grammatical English sentences...). [Ellen]

Ellen, I agree that the even lower education of the ‘masses’ is a real problem, and that is certainly a related topic worthy of posting about. My main concern here though is with the top, most well-informed educational levels: The people who determine the direction of a culture, who run the art institutes and schools and become professors and magazine editors and famous writers are the most highly educated “elites”, specifically those who have spent, if not a lifetime, many decades reading history books, taking advanced courses, visiting the great museums, discussing, writing, reading about Shakespeare vs. Dickens or Rembrandt vs. Vermeer vs. Monet or light opera and ballet and so forth.

A tiny, tiny well-read and cultured group that determines the course of the culture and always has throughout history.

Rand’s point about trying to fight those sophisticated enough to use nuclear weapons with Republican pea-shooters or popguns applies here.

Students of Objectivism are simply not on that level and not interested or devoted to those topics [again, on average]. I notice this every time I try to talk about my interests in those areas in a group of Objectivists who’d rather talk about horror file issues, about Hillary or Al Gore or economic interventionism than culture.

And your next point excellently indicates a reason why for this slanting of focus:

“Rand taught a view of the history of thought prior to her which is a dismal view of mostly a wasteland (populated by mind-destroyers) lit by only the rare exceptions. To the extent her view of the history of thought was believed, her followers weren't motivated to read outside the approved list.”

[ I suspect that is more the reason than what you said next: “Having the worry "What does this response mean about me?" hanging like the sword of Damocles over one's head in approaching the aesthetic realm, doesn't conduce to intrepid exploring”, but I don’t want to quibble too much.]

Thought experiment: Suppose you were bored in high school or freshman year in college by poor teachers, political correctness, repetitiousness, bad textbooks in the fields of literature, the arts, history, sociology, the classics. And then suppose you had read the writer you most admire and she had told you, in a series of essays:

1. That there is a whole world of literary geniuses in addition to the handful she liked. That Shakespeare is one of the world great writers and here are some quotes to show it. That Dickens may be sort of a quasi-socialist but he is also a great writer of enormous value in other ways and with great insight into people.

2. That the whole sphere of the classic writers (playwrights, poets, historians) of Greece and Rome is like landing on a distant shore of profoundness and beauty.

3. That there are brilliant writers and important historians working in the Twentieth Century, includin Winston Churchill, Paul Johnson, J.M. Roberts, William McNeill, the Barraclough series. . .

And I could go on for another page or so . . . and give numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 just out of my own experience and explorings from the eighties thru the present.

If this had happened, you wouldn’t be finding Oists always retreating into the sciences and sci-fi or saying “I only read non-fiction” or never having seen an opera or engaged in a Binswanger-ish constant bitching about a “cultural wasteland” which they have not personally explored. [Actually, Peikoff, a well-read man, and his courses on Great Plays and the like were a corrective to this yahoo – redneck - solipsist trend. But a lot of people will simply read his short list of selections and stop there. And the overwhelming majority of Oists today never took those courses and is not sufficiently motivated to put down their Mickey Spillane and seek them out.]

[Ellen Stuttle]

I thought that DF had used the term ["Objectikitsch"] on RoR back before we were tagged as dirty dog dissenters.

J

The plot thickens. Apparently, Dragonfly is right about the false memory, since I thanked him for the term here on OL in early February. So maybe what I recall is saying "Objectivist kitsch," without the contraction. I asked Larry if he recalled my using some such term, and he promptly said yes and referred to our having an argument when he bought the only Bryan Larsen print in this house and my calling the print something of the sort. (I didn't want the print hung on a wall; we ended up compromising by his positioning it where it's out of my range of sight in the computer room and hidden behind the door when one enters the room. Thus he can look at it if he wants to and I don't have to see it.)

Ellen

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[Ellen Stuttle]

I think that it has something to do with the hand gesture.

I like the hands as well, despite not liking the sculpture as a whole.

J

I like the hands also. Oddly, this weekend I saw a large hanging-tapestry-type advertisement -- hung over an outer wall of the Jorgensen Theater at U.Conn -- which has a photo of a dancer leaping in a way so that the top half of the body is positioned like that of the top half of the statue. But the dancer being airborne, the legs are curled behind the leaping torso. I was interested to note that the photo appealed to me.

Ellen

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[Alfonso Jones]

(snip)

Rand’s point about trying to fight those sophisticated enough to use nuclear weapons with Republican pea-shooters or popguns applies here.

(snip)

I thought I'd quote in context the pea-shooter comment by Rand (from The Cashing-In, The Student "Rebellion" from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal):

"Ideas cannot he fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming n full, consistent, and radical alternative.

This does not mean that rational students should enter debates with the rebels or attempt to convert them: one cannot argue with self-confessed irrationalists. The goal of an ideological battle is to enlighten the vast, helpless, bewildered majority in the universities—and in the country at large—or, rather, the minds of those among the majority who are struggling to find answers or those who, having heard nothing but collectivist sophistries for years, have withdrawn in revulsion and given up.

The first goal of such a battle is to wrest from a handful of beatniks the title of "spokesmen for American youth," which the press is so anxious to grant them. The first step is to make oneself heard, on the campus and outside. There are many civilized ways to do it: protest meetings, public petitions, speeches, pamphlets, letters-to-editors. It is a much more important issue than picketing the United Nations or parading in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And while such futile groups as Young Americans for Freedom are engaged in such undertakings, they are letting the collectivist vanguard speak in their name—in the name of American college students—without any audible sound of protest.

But in order to be heard, one must have something to say. To have that, one must know one's case. One must know it fully, logically, consistently, all the way down to philosophical fundamentals. One cannot hope to fight nuclear experts with Republican pea-shooters. And the leaders behind the student rebellion are experts at their particular game.

But they are dangerous only to those who stare at the issues out of focus and hope to fight ideas by means of faith, feelings, and fund-raising. You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not approach: appeal to human intelligence.

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have."

Beautiful.

Alfonso

[BaalChatzaf]

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have."

The only weapons that determine the course of history? The Romans did rather well with the Legions. Armed with the pylum and the gladius and iron discipline they carved one of the greatest empires in history. If it weren't for lead poisoning they might still be in existence. The Romans had three things going for them: straight roads, water delivery and the Legions.

I admire the Romans very much. Seeing their great accomplishments puts me in touch with my Inner Fascist.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have."

The only weapons that determine the course of history? The Romans did rather well with the Legions. Armed with the pylum and the gladius and iron discipline they carved one of the greatest empires in history. If it weren't for lead poisoning they might still be in existence. The Romans had three things going for them: straight roads, water delivery and the Legions.

I admire the Romans very much. Seeing their great accomplishments puts me in touch with my Inner Fascist.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Do you admire Cicero?

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

Thought experiment: Suppose you were bored in high school or freshman year in college by poor teachers, political correctness, repetitiousness, bad textbooks in the fields of literature, the arts, history, sociology, the classics. And then suppose you had read the writer you most admire and she had told you, in a series of essays:

[....]

The "Catch 22" to the thought experiment is that she wouldn't have been Rand if she'd done that. It's like asking her to have been two different people. The dramatic contrasts of good and evil were so much part of her dramatic power. I don't think she could have written the way she wrote (and I mean her novels, too, not just her non-fiction) if she'd viewed the history of thought in the way you suggest.

Ellen

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As a curiosity, "Objectivist kitsch" is in a review written by Joseph Sobran of Judgment Day by Nathaniel Branden. It came out in 1989 in National Review. Here is the quote from the article.

Branden has few good words for his friends of those years; he clearly regards the whole scene as morbid. But it has left its traces on him; his prose still has the ring of Objectivist kitsch, overworking adverbs like "profoundly" and "passionately" to heighten the sense of drama or lend a touch of gravity.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

semi-successful

(deleted) but boy did I have fun writing it! hahahahahah

That's the way they talk elsewhere, Michael, not we here. Personally, I can take it either way. I haven't seen any negatives, though, with the policy of this site.

--Brant

[Newberry]

That's the way they talk elsewhere, Michael, not we here. Personally, I can take it either way. I haven't seen any negatives, though, with the policy of this site.

--Brant

Brant,

Understood. But snide bitchiness under the guise of civility is disgusting. I don't know what the language code is here or elsewhere but my favorite writer is Aristophanes...a good direct screw is worth more than a worthless lay of words.

Michael

[Newberry]

The "Catch 22" to the thought experiment is that she wouldn't have been Rand if she'd done that. It's like asking her to have been two different people. The dramatic contrasts of good and evil were so much part of her dramatic power. I don't think she could have written the way she wrote (and I mean her novels, too, not just her non-fiction) if she'd viewed the history of thought in the way you suggest.

Ellen

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Ellen,

This is such a great observation.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

deleted

Edited October 22, 2007 by Brant Gaede

[BaalChatzaf]

If this had happened, you wouldn’t be finding Oists always retreating into the sciences and sci-fi or saying “I only read non-fiction” or never having seen an opera or engaged in a Binswanger-ish constant bitching about a “cultural wasteland” which they have not personally explored. [Actually, Peikoff, a well-read man, and his courses on Great Plays and the like were a corrective to this yahoo – redneck - solipsist trend. But a lot of people will simply read his short list of selections and stop there. And the overwhelming majority of Oists today never took those courses and is not sufficiently motivated to put down their Mickey Spillane and seek them out.]

This is a description of what I call The Curse of the Guru. The Oist fanatics are far from the only ones who have suffered from this disorder. In the Shettles of Europe, the Rebe, the religious leader, the Guru had such an influence over the young men of the village that if he had a nervous tic, his followers would imitate it faithfully. That believed every thing the Rebe did was a revelation from G-D himself. If the Rebe ate his groats before he ate his beans, then so did his students. Every little thing was given Significance.

Unfortunately there is nothing new about this, and a thousand years from now this will still happen. Whatever happened to intellectual independence? Where has it gone?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

As a curiosity, "Objectivist kitsch" is in a review written by Joseph Sobran of Judgment Day by Nathaniel Branden. It came out in 1989 in National Review. Here is the quote from the article.

I don't recall having read that, though I might have seen it reprinted somewhere -- we've never subscribed to National Review. The article -- quick-read impression -- has a sort of caricaturing accuracy. I don't, however, understand this comment:

"[...] drawn in equal parts from Wagner and James Thurber" (my italics).

Neither part of the comparison seems on target to me. I think that Rand did have an image of herself which distorted, but not in the ways Wagner's self-image did. And James Thurber? I don't get this comparison at all.

Ellen

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Edited October 22, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Brant Gaede]

If this had happened, you wouldn’t be finding Oists always retreating into the sciences and sci-fi or saying “I only read non-fiction” or never having seen an opera or engaged in a Binswanger-ish constant bitching about a “cultural wasteland” which they have not personally explored. [Actually, Peikoff, a well-read man, and his courses on Great Plays and the like were a corrective to this yahoo – redneck - solipsist trend. But a lot of people will simply read his short list of selections and stop there. And the overwhelming majority of Oists today never took those courses and is not sufficiently motivated to put down their Mickey Spillane and seek them out.]

This is a description of what I call The Curse of the Guru. The Oist fanatics are far from the only ones who have suffered from this disorder. In the Shettles of Europe, the Rebe, the religious leader, the Guru had such an influence over the young men of the village that if he had a nervous tic, his followers would imitate it faithfully. That believed every thing the Rebe did was a revelation from G-D himself. If the Rebe ate his groats before he ate his beans, then so did his students. Every little thing was given Significance.

Unfortunately there is nothing new about this, and a thousand years from now this will still happen. Whatever happened to intellectual independence? Where has it gone?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Tucson, Arizona!

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Tucson, Arizona!

--Brant

What is going on in Tucson? Or what is not going on Tucson? Should I know about it. Hep me, hep me!

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Tucson, Arizona!

--Brant

What is going on in Tucson? Or what is not going on Tucson? Should I know about it. Hep me, hep me!

Ba'al Chatzaf

I live there! What else do u need to know!

--Brant

[Dragonfly]

"[...] drawn in equal parts from Wagner and James Thurber" (my italics).

Neither part of the comparison seems on target to me. I think that Rand did have an image of herself which distorted, but not in the ways Wagner's self-image did. And James Thurber? I don't get this comparison at all.

I don't know James Thurber, but I can understand the reference to Wagner, with his big pathos. Rand definitely had something Wagnerian about her. I see no reference to "having an image of herself", so I don't think that is relevant here. Further the text seems to refer to Branden's writing and not directly to Rand herself (the formulation is a bit ambiguous). Not that I think that Branden's description is inaccurate.

[Ellen Stuttle]

I signed on to make a comment about the sculpture which started this thread. (I'm not understanding DF's comment about no reference to a self-image, and I don't see Rand as Wagnerian, really. But...not my focus at the moment.)

Having seen the dancer image I described earlier (that figure was clad, wearing a robe sort of garb, though displaying, discernible under the robe, much the same pose -- although airborne -- as the statue), and having responded positively in a way I didn't to the statue, though I do like Schipperheyn's work in general, I messed around a bit with postures -- as did "Lance" in a post quoted from SOLO. I'm trying to zero in on what about the statue doesn't appeal to me. I don't think "Objectikitsh" is a fair description. Near as I noticed on a rapid read of Schipperheyn's website, I see no signs of any reference to Rand. And he's very much his own person. What I'm thinking is that it's something about the legs, maybe the appearance of the knee joint. I'm reminded of my own childhood-polio-affected "hamstrung" appearance of the lower legs. Few people would notice this, but I notice. There seems to me something "tied down" about the statue -- though not by the artist's "intent," I feel. The intent seems to me a major "Eureka!" experience. And that's from before I read his description of having gotten the image during a near-waking dream state. I like "the idea," but the execution -- with all respect to the artist -- just doesn't do it, from my view. (The hands, though, I think I'll remember as connecting with images I love of hands.)

Ellen

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Edited October 22, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle