Michelle Marder Kamhi's "Who Says That's Art?"

[ThatGuy]

[

(And, in theory, if the concept were erased by zealots redacting the Kantian influence, it would no doubt simply rise again under a new name, when some aspiring artist or philosopher encountered a forbidden "terror that delights"...)

Great post, but I have just a tiny nitpick. If we were to redact only the Kantian influence, we'd still have the historical concept that existed before Kant, which would still leave us with the "terror that delights."...

Oh, fair point, and no argument, there. I was just riffing on Ninth Doctor's quip:

"So I wouldn't worry about some anti-Newspeak thoughtcrime, a banned concept of the Sublime, as though Kant's work is to be consigned to the flames when the Revolutionary Objectivist Total Freedom Liberators (ROTFL) seize control and de-nationalize the libraries. And put the collected writings of Newberry in their place. Redacted, as needed, to eliminate traces of Kant's actual ideas as might be reconstructed from his presentation (not that such redaction would take much effort)."

[anthony]

I know it to be "investment" in truth and my mind. I've never suffered "repression" of my passion for those.

Logic: The art of non-contradictory identification.

That definition blows Kant's assertions of (self-acknowledged) subjectivity and emotions away, as illogical.

[Jonathan]

Must hate Kant! Rand said so!

[anthony]

A brilliant thinker I see as misguided. It's as though he was blinded by a quest to harmonize Nature and Man, and man and man.

Good intentions, but the road to hell, etc. (anyhow, that's nothing I can validate yet, if ever).

I think Kant arrived at some right conclusions for the wrong reasons, and some pretty terrible conclusions from the correct premises.

How can anyone explain the excellent thinking in confirming man's life as "an end in itself"...

then from that somehow establishing his principle of Duty to others?!

His Sublime, I consider a pale shadow of Rand's "man is a being of volitional consciousness". He rationalized his version, subjectively, while Rand justified hers, objectively.

Again, from what I know, Kant avoided identity and identification.

[Brant Gaede]

Rand's aminadversion on Kant seems to be using rhetoric to leverage up the value of formal philosophy in human being, hence her own value as a philosopher, amongst all the other brianiac professions. In such a cosmology you need super villians for your super heroes. Villians like Plato and Kant. She never figured out or explicated on why that contradicted her working philosophical premise in her novels of the impotence of evil except through the sanction of the victim. You can always come up with both blatant truth or, if need be, rationalization, especially through reductionism, for the power of the sanction of the victim. For instance, 9/11. You have to reduce that to sanctioning- uh, Kant?

--Brant

[Jonathan]

How can anyone explain the excellent thinking in confirming man's life as "an end in itself"...

then from that somehow establishing his principle of Duty to others?!

Heh. Where did you get "duty to others"?

His Sublime, I consider a pale shadow of Rand's "man is a being of volitional consciousness".

"His" Sublime is the historical Sublime. There is no other, at least not in philosophy. The only other "sublime" is merely a layman's concept. "His" Sublime is the essence of Rand's art. It is her aesthetic sense-of-life. It is her signature aesthetic style.

He rationalized his version, subjectively, while Rand justified hers, objectively.

You're talking out of your ass.

Rand didn't have a "version." She didn't address the philosophical subject of the Sublime. She only occasionally used the layman's term "sublime" while not realizing that the word also had a very long history in the philosophy of aesthetics.

Again, from what I know, Kant avoided identity and identification.

From what you know? Heh. You know nothing but obedience to Rand, especially to her errors and areas of ignorance. Kant identified in excruciating detail everything about the Sublime.

J

[anthony]

How can anyone explain the excellent thinking in confirming man's life as "an end in itself"...

then from that somehow establishing his principle of Duty to others?!

Heh. Where did you get "duty to others"?

His Sublime, I consider a pale shadow of Rand's "man is a being of volitional consciousness".

"His" Sublime is the historical Sublime. There is no other, at least not in philosophy. The only other "sublime" is merely a layman's concept. "His" Sublime is the essence of Rand's art. It is her aesthetic sense-of-life. It is her signature aesthetic style.

He rationalized his version, subjectively, while Rand justified hers, objectively.

You're talking out of your ass.

Rand didn't have a "version." She didn't address the philosophical subject of the Sublime. She only occasionally used the layman's term "sublime" while not realizing that the word also had a very long history in the philosophy of aesthetics.

Again, from what I know, Kant avoided identity and identification.

From what you know? Heh. You know nothing but obedience to Rand, especially to her errors and areas of ignorance. Kant identified in excruciating detail everything about the Sublime.

J

Perhaps you could have learned by now that "a volitional consciousness" is the entire ground of Romanticism to Rand.

It is certainly not "her aesthetic sense of life" - "her signature aesthetic style".

Poppycock.

Sense of life - preconceptual and subconscious.

Volitional consciousness - conceptual (conscious).

The "layman's" "sublime", is indeed how it has always been read in novels and poetry, used widely especially in religious doctrine, hymns, prayer, etc. . You appear to think the word had no useage or applications before some philosophers raised it to their purposes and lent it their specific meaning.

If Rand took it and its conceptual meaning from anywhere except the dictionary and her fictional reading, I think it could be from religion (Aquinas?), which explains her emphasis on being atheist in her 'hymn' to NYCity.

And again: The Sublime is subjective. Rand's volition, objective. No comparison except superficially.

Kant's "excruciating detail" was necessitated because he could not explain it rationally and simply.

Kant's moral philosophy is known by all academics for being deontological and if it is, as he states it, duty to a principle (of "Humanity") this rationalist and collectivist notion cannot be divorced in reality from other people.

The Formula of the Universal Law of Nature: "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law".

{i.e. "You" are the arbiter of moral action - so, it's subjective and universal, at once. Be careful what you choose to do, because all other people should and could do the same. Not even as effective as the Golden Rule, imo]

The Humanity Formula: "...we should never act in such a way that we treat Humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself".

[A self-evident 'given', for any rational person. But who or what is this Humanity "in ourselves and others"? No explanation based on identity, except for IK invoking our "good will', "good intentions" and others "dignity" as I've read. And why?? Another Platonic assertion by the neo-mystic]

[Thorn]

Oh, but Newbsie's contorted freaks are very Objectivist! His art is an example of what happens when Rand's followers attempt to impose her aesthetic rules and tastes onto visual art, and when they adopt the fantasy of being real life visual arts equivalents of Howard Roark. Objectivism in the visual arts is the practice of the artist announcing through his work that he possesses the explosively joyous, passionate, and proper "sense-of-life" that he is required to have as an Objectivist, via overtly visually signaling his internal state in his characters' external states -- through excessively artificially posed body language, and artlessly staged, unrealistic environments. That's Objectivist visual art 101.

J

In what sense do you use the word Objectivist? I'm not so sure Ayn Rand would have approved of some of the Objectivist art. I mean, if she thought Maxfield Parrish was trash, then what about Objecti-kitsch?

[Jonathan]

[

(And, in theory, if the concept were erased by zealots redacting the Kantian influence, it would no doubt simply rise again under a new name, when some aspiring artist or philosopher encountered a forbidden "terror that delights"...)

Great post, but I have just a tiny nitpick. If we were to redact only the Kantian influence, we'd still have the historical concept that existed before Kant, which would still leave us with the "terror that delights."...

Oh, fair point, and no argument, there. I was just riffing on Ninth Doctor's quip:

"So I wouldn't worry about some anti-Newspeak thoughtcrime, a banned concept of the Sublime, as though Kant's work is to be consigned to the flames when the Revolutionary Objectivist Total Freedom Liberators (ROTFL) seize control and de-nationalize the libraries. And put the collected writings of Newberry in their place. Redacted, as needed, to eliminate traces of Kant's actual ideas as might be reconstructed from his presentation (not that such redaction would take much effort)."

Okay, thanks.

Anyway, on the issue of Ninth's statement in that post, he's correct that concepts are open-ended (within reason), and that throughout history, people have added to the concept of the Sublime.

There's nothing wrong with that. Great thinkers have sought to clarify, sharpen and hone.

But they've done so in reference to the same phenomenon, the same experience. Which is that way that it should be: The discussion necessarily must refer to and denote the same experience or entity.

Newbsie's quest doesn't follow that rational course. His seeking to "update" the philosophical meaning of the word "Sublime" so that it no longer refers to the confounding experience of combined fear and delight via feeling one's will to resist in the face of immense powers and magnitudes is like seeking to "update" the word "chair" so that it refers to something other than chairs. In other words, its not an update at all, but simply an issue of removing the "visual-auditory symbol" from one phenomenon and attaching it to another. It's pointless, irrelevant semantics. It's tilting at windmills.

So the question is, what drives someone to want to take such a pointless action, and to do so with such fury and stamina? If someone were here passionately advocating that we "update" the word "chair" so that it denotes the entities known as chifforobes, would it not seem insane? Would we not ask, "To what purpose?"? Would we not wonder why this person was obsessed with owning and controlling the word "chair," and protecting it from having to denote the entities that it has always denoted?

J

[Brant Gaede]

Oh, but Newbsie's contorted freaks are very Objectivist! His art is an example of what happens when Rand's followers attempt to impose her aesthetic rules and tastes onto visual art, and when they adopt the fantasy of being real life visual arts equivalents of Howard Roark. Objectivism in the visual arts is the practice of the artist announcing through his work that he possesses the explosively joyous, passionate, and proper "sense-of-life" that he is required to have as an Objectivist, via overtly visually signaling his internal state in his characters' external states -- through excessively artificially posed body language, and artlessly staged, unrealistic environments. That's Objectivist visual art 101.

J

In what sense do you use the word Objectivist? I'm not so sure Ayn Rand would have approved of some of the Objectivist art. I mean, if she thought Maxfield Parrish was trash, then what about Objecti-kitsch?

My wild guess is she would have hated it the same way she hated expositions on her philosophy by the unqualified and un-sanctioned.

--Brant

[Jonathan]

Oh, but Newbsie's contorted freaks are very Objectivist! His art is an example of what happens when Rand's followers attempt to impose her aesthetic rules and tastes onto visual art, and when they adopt the fantasy of being real life visual arts equivalents of Howard Roark. Objectivism in the visual arts is the practice of the artist announcing through his work that he possesses the explosively joyous, passionate, and proper "sense-of-life" that he is required to have as an Objectivist, via overtly visually signaling his internal state in his characters' external states -- through excessively artificially posed body language, and artlessly staged, unrealistic environments. That's Objectivist visual art 101.

J

In what sense do you use the word Objectivist? I'm not so sure Ayn Rand would have approved of some of the Objectivist art. I mean, if she thought Maxfield Parrish was trash, then what about Objecti-kitsch?

In the above, I use the word "Objectivist" in the sense of Rand's publicly presented aesthetic rules and tastes in art, even though I don't think of those rules and tastes as qualifying as "objective" or "Objectivist" (my view is that much of her aesthetic theory does not comply with the Objectivist epistemology).

As for which works of art Rand would have approved of, that's anyone's guess, especially in the realm of the visual arts. She was inconsistent, and she had novice tastes. She seemed to enjoy hating a lot of art, and looking for something to condemn in it (her peculiar interpretations of Vermeer's work being a great example of novice visual abilities combined with a hostile attitude). The smart money would bet that any painting that you were to show her would likely be met with bile.

She did give some indications now and then about her subjective preferences in visual art. And her followers include those tastes in their art. Bright colors, uncontrolled/non-limited palette, wide value gamut contrast, sharp outlines, differentiated colors-contours, hard lighting, hard shadows, overtly expressive characters, etc.

I agree that if she had seen what her followers interpret her as having wished for, she probably wouldn't have liked it. She wasn't a visual artist, and I don't think that she could really visualize how crappy visual art would be if anyone actually indulged her attempt to impose her theory of literature onto the visual arts.

J

[Brant Gaede]

"Not my sense of life" is what I imagine Rand would say about competently done visual art she didn't like. I say "competently done" to cover art she liked incompetently done or simply inferior on the face of it like that one done by her husband she had put on the cover of the 25th An. Ed. of The Fountainhead. This bypasses actual esthetics. By and large I don't think Frank O'Connor produced Objectivist kitsch, not even with this one, to my knowledge his worst.

--Brant

it's hard to admire something when you have the skill sans composition to do the same thing and that's hardly any skill at all (not true for me of his other work)

[Jonathan]

I looked up the word "heroism" in the hopes of "updating" it, but the online sources just basically define it as "courage" and "valor," etc.

So I looked up those words.

For "courage," I found this:

noun
1.
the power or quality of dealing with or facing danger, fear, pain, etc.

No!!! Not danger, fear and pain!!! It must have been Kant who put those things in there! We should take them out. We should protect the word "courage" and make it about dealing with harmless fun things!

For "valor," I found:

noun
1.
boldness or determination in facing great danger, especially in battle.

Danger again!!! WTF? And battle?!!! Unacceptably Kantian! We shouldn't value war like that! We should be able to experience valor without loving war! "Valor" will now mean boldness and determination in being nice and polite and enjoying good times!

J

[Thorn]

Oh, but Newbsie's contorted freaks are very Objectivist! His art is an example of what happens when Rand's followers attempt to impose her aesthetic rules and tastes onto visual art, and when they adopt the fantasy of being real life visual arts equivalents of Howard Roark. Objectivism in the visual arts is the practice of the artist announcing through his work that he possesses the explosively joyous, passionate, and proper "sense-of-life" that he is required to have as an Objectivist, via overtly visually signaling his internal state in his characters' external states -- through excessively artificially posed body language, and artlessly staged, unrealistic environments. That's Objectivist visual art 101.

J

In what sense do you use the word Objectivist? I'm not so sure Ayn Rand would have approved of some of the Objectivist art. I mean, if she thought Maxfield Parrish was trash, then what about Objecti-kitsch?

In the above, I use the word "Objectivist" in the sense of Rand's publicly presented aesthetic rules and tastes in art, even though I don't think of those rules and tastes as qualifying as "objective" or "Objectivist" (my view is that much of her aesthetic theory does not comply with the Objectivist epistemology).

As for which works of art Rand would have approved of, that's anyone's guess, especially in the realm of the visual arts. She was inconsistent, and she had novice tastes. She seemed to enjoy hating a lot of art, and looking for something to condemn in it (her peculiar interpretations of Vermeer's work being a great example of novice visual abilities combined with a hostile attitude). The smart money would bet that any painting that you were to show her would likely be met with bile.

She did give some indications now and then about her subjective preferences in visual art. And her followers include those tastes in their art. Bright colors, uncontrolled/non-limited palette, wide value gamut contrast, sharp outlines, differentiated colors-contours, hard lighting, hard shadows, overtly expressive characters, etc.

I agree that if she had seen what her followers interpret her as having wished for, she probably wouldn't have liked it. She wasn't a visual artist, and I don't think that she could really visualize how crappy visual art would be if anyone actually indulged her attempt to impose her theory of literature onto the visual arts.

J

True, they do follow her aesthetics. At least when taken at face value. However, regurgitating the same themes and doing the n'th number of contrived poses expressing joy and rapture doesn't go well with the rest of her ideas. I don't think that's what she envisioned. I can only speculate, of course.

Yeah, it's hard to guess what she would have approved of. Calling her interpretations of Vermeer 'peculiar' is too kind. They're flat out wrong. Only thing she got right was calling his handling of light masterful, though it's hardly what his painting were about. Capuletti has also been mentioned before, and though I like some of his work he was hardly a "virtuoso". Her judgement on visual art certainly was strange.

[anthony]

"Not my sense of life" is what I imagine Rand would say about competently done visual art she didn't like. I say "competently done" to cover art she liked incompetently done or simply inferior on the face of it like that one done by her husband she had put on the cover of the 25th An. Ed. of The Fountainhead. This bypasses actual esthetics. By and large I don't think Frank O'Connor produced Objectivist kitsch, not even with this one, to my knowledge his worst.

--Brant

it's hard to admire something when you have the skill sans composition to do the same thing and that's hardly any skill at all (not true for me of his other work)

Brant, stop me if you've heard this one (AR).

"...it is not a contradiction to say : 'This is a great work of art, but I don't like it.'"

You must have experienced that feeling. Would she have agreed that the reverse can also be valid? (This is not a great work of art, but I like it). I think so. Because she went on: "... the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level..."

Assuming it is not too aesthetically inept.

[anthony]

J

True, they do follow her aesthetics. At least when taken at face value. However, regurgitating the same themes and doing the n'th number of contrived poses expressing joy and rapture doesn't go well with the rest of her ideas. I don't think that's what she envisioned. I can only speculate, of course.

Yeah, it's hard to guess what she would have approved of. Calling her interpretations of Vermeer 'peculiar' is too kind. They're flat out wrong. Only thing she got right was calling his handling of light masterful, though it's hardly what his painting were about. Capuletti has also been mentioned before, and though I like some of his work he was hardly a "virtuoso". Her judgement on visual art certainly was strange.

In particular for the visual arts, it's a good idea to closely study the how and why of Rand's theory, but mostly get over her 'what' - her own preferences and dislikes. What possesses objective value for one individual to the next, varies widely in art, I think

[Brant Gaede]

"Not my sense of life" is what I imagine Rand would say about competently done visual art she didn't like. I say "competently done" to cover art she liked incompetently done or simply inferior on the face of it like that one done by her husband she had put on the cover of the 25th An. Ed. of The Fountainhead. This bypasses actual esthetics. By and large I don't think Frank O'Connor produced Objectivist kitsch, not even with this one, to my knowledge his worst.

--Brant

it's hard to admire something when you have the skill sans composition to do the same thing and that's hardly any skill at all (not true for me of his other work)

Brant, stop me if you've heard this one (AR).

"...it is not a contradiction to say : 'This is a great work of art, but I don't like it.'"

You must have experienced that feeling. Would she have agreed that the reverse can also be valid? (This is not a great work of art, but I like it). I think so. Because she went on: "... the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level..."

Assuming it is not too aesthetically inept.

She did not issue an esthetic evaluation of "Man Also Rises." Not that I know of. I liked it when I purchased the 25th ed in 1968 and I still like it there. It was nicely done with the jacket's white borders. That year was the high point of my Rand intellectual-cultural-Objectivism-movement psychology stage of my life. Today I'd have to call it me being a "Randroid" but it was as innocent as it could be considering my age. I grew into it by growing out of conservativism and I grew out of it. If you keep growing you'll keep shedding your skin not held into it.

--Brant

right libertarian up from Objectivism but still attached

"Take what you want," said God, "and pay for it." Nathaniel Branden liked to quote that and said Rand had a liking for it too and if you think about it that was much more The Fountainhead than Atlas Shrugged--it certainly helps explain their relationship as it started out--that and hormones

[Wolf DeVoon]

hormones

Unconvincing and somewhat silly.

[Selene]

Brant, stop me if you've heard this one (AR).

"...it is not a contradiction to say : 'This is a great work of art, but I don't like it.'"

You must have experienced that feeling. Would she have agreed that the reverse can also be valid? (This is not a great work of art, but I like it). I think so. Because she went on: "... the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level..."

Assuming it is not too aesthetically inept.

Tony:

The Romantic Manifesto, I truly enjoyed this when I read it and I think I should re-read it since it is covered with my notes.

To those who have not read it:

http://litresp.ru/chitat/en/R/rand-ayn/the-romantic-manifesto-a-philosophy-of-literature

“THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT ISSUED IN THE NAME OF AN ORGANIZATION OR A MOVEMENT. I SPEAK ONLY FOR MYSELF. THERE IS NO ROMANTIC MOVEMENT TODAY. IF THERE IS TO BE ONE IN THE ART OF THE FUTURE, THIS BOOK WILL HAVE HELPED IT TO COME INTO BEING.”

Ayn was such a class act when she was focused.

A...

[Brant Gaede]

hormones

Unconvincing and somewhat silly.

Okay, strike "hormones."

--Brant

that was easy

[Wolf DeVoon]

Google's version of the sublime. https://frightgeist.withgoogle.com/costume/Harley-Quinn

[Brant Gaede]

You cannot show the Sublime. You can show someone contemplating what triggered the experience.

--Brant

that's my understanding of it

[9thdoctor]

A couple unrelated points (alas written a bit too quickly):

Kant arrived at his presentation of the Sublime via induction, at least to some extent he must have. He experienced numerous instances of it through contemplation of nature and art, introspected, omitted the measurements etcetera and so on. And he talked to others about their experiences (students, fellow professors, Lampe); please don't dismiss this as "subjective". The alternative would be that he read Burke and just made up his own variation on it arbitrarily, which is a hopeless thesis. Even more hopeless: he deliberately devised a version of it that would, centuries later, spawn Modern Art, with the goal of destroying the mind, culture, and the civilized world, all of which Kant hated, forsaw, and was brilliant enough to know how to undermine.

The implication being that the facts giving rise to the concept were out there, and are still out there, so again, don't worry about Newspeak wiping it out. When you hear someone use the word Sublime today it's like hearing the word Liberal. Its association with the likes of Hillary Clinton doesn't mean Thomas Jefferson's political ideas have disappeared (well, wait a minute...).

Second point, on understanding the motivation to attack Kant's Critique of Judgement. What Rand left behind is similar to Fermat's Last Theorem. It would be quite a feather in the cap of whichever dilletante Objectivist philosopher who could discover the connections and reconstruct her critique of the Critique. Rand may have been thinking of some other issue, nothing to do with the Sublime, that connection is Newberry's invention. This challenge is up there with Induction, just think, you could be ranked as highly as David Harriman if you just apply yourself to it. So now get to it! Glory awaits. It might even get you laid.

[Brant Gaede]

Fermat claimed a solution. Rand said she hadn't one/there wasn't one--yet.

--Brant

[9thdoctor]

Fermat claimed a solution. Rand said she hadn't one/there wasn't one--yet.

On the contrary, not only did she claim to have a solution, she implied that anyone reading Critique of Judgement would find it (easily?) on their own. Here's the quote:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/modern_art.html

While the alleged advocates of reason oppose system-building and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man's psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is mans integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.

It is highly doubtful that the practitioners and admirers of modern art have the intellectual capacity to understand its philosophical meaning; all they need to do is indulge the worst of their subconscious premises. But their leaders do understand the issue consciously: the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).

From the first quoted paragraph it seems clear the context of her charge against Kant is that his target is "man's integrating capacity", ultimately meaning concept formation. Where do you find that in CJ? How about if she misread (equivocated on) his characterization of the Beautiful as "universality without concept"? I'm not saying that was her thesis, but I could propound it with Newberry-grade competence and do a bang up job of convincing a large share of Objecti-nitwits.