The conservative-attack-on-Ayn-Rand essay isn’t anything new, and I don’t know if anyone will ever top Whittaker Chambers’s classic review of Atlas Shrugged, but The New Criterion’s Anthony Daniels has made another entry in the genre.
It is not altogether surprising that Roark lacks taste; Rand herself did, too. She called Bach and Mozart “pre-musical,” preferring Tchaikovsky and even Lehár. She thought that Victor Hugo was the greatest novelist who ever lived. She ridiculed Rembrandt’s “visual distortions.” These judgments show her to have been seriously deficient in sensibility and discrimination across a wide range of important human activities: in fact, I cannot think of any field in which she showed proper aesthetic or intellectual judgment.
I can’t completely endorse Daniels’s reading of The Fountainhead, but I still enjoy this kind of essay.
Will Truman 
Patrick Cahalan 
Cornelius 
wardsmith 
Tod Kelly 
Tom Van Dyke 
Murali 
James Hanley 
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I’m just listening with sadness…a little sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt,
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Art, once past a certain level of skill and esthetics, is subjective, so this is really just a disagreement on taste. It’s not like preferring Pee Wee Herman to Peter Sellers.
Sorry, Mike. The greatness of Bach is objective truth.
Kidding aside, it is a disagreement about taste. But I happen to think disagreements about taste are important, especially when they involved an author who claimed to have a totally rational aesthetic system.
I will not always defend Ayn Rand, but I will say this: Her taste in architecture was absolutely not Le Corbusier.
She favored the work of the later Frank Lloyd Wright and lived in a house by Richard Neutra, of which she was very proud. They too were modernists, but modernists of a very different flavor.
I had always heard that when Rand described Roark’s in The Fountainhead projects she had Wright in mind.
I also think Daniels is quite obviously wrong about Rand’s thoughts on the relationship between human greatness and market success. Ayn Rand wasn’t trying to argue that the market is “always the source and proper judge of value.” Will Wilkinson covered that pretty well a while back.
Yes, Daniels is sloppy in his interpretation of Rand. Still, like I said, I don’t get tired of these.
Yes, I read Rand’s books regarding her ideas on art and love of Romanticism. I admire her attempt to create objective criteria for art, and in a sense she was close, in my opinion — like I say, once past a certain level, which is fairly objective, in that it meets certain accepted requirements, art becomes subjective — some like Hugo, some like Tolstoy, some like Wordsworth, some like Shelley, but it’s easy to tell them from the lesser talents. The canon establishes a differientiation, although there can be disagreement on what should be included in the canon.
As someone who routinely reads amateur fiction, nonfiction, and verse, I have to agree.
Oh, and one other thing — before anyone trashes Victor Hugo, I’d caution them that many widely available English translations are painfully bad. If you’ve read him in French, maybe we can talk. Otherwise, I dunno.
Sorry, Mike. The greatness of Bach is objective truth.
Mozart was a red.
Louis B., that was great.
I fail to see how Rand’s distinction is one of taste. She is not saying that Mozart is worse than Tchaikovsky, she is literally saying that his works is not even music; likewise Rembrandt’s work is not even art. And as with most of her statements, there is an assumed claim that those who disagree are mindless and do not deserve to appreciate true art unless they repent. I think it’s pretty valid to criticize a self-proclaimed trend-spotter for saying that Peter Sellers is as bad as Pee Wee Herman, for example.
Rand dedicated Atlas Shrugged, her philosophical magnum opus, to Nathaniel Branden … and promptly redacted the dedication after he refused to sleep with her. I think that’s about all one can say for the strength of her convictions.
I do think there’s a difference between subjective matters of taste and objective aesthetic judgments. I can say that, personally, I love Ron Howard’s movies (I really don’t), and that’s a valid matter of subjective taste. But, if I say that Ron Howard is one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, I think it’s pretty easy to show, using widely-accepted objective aesthetic criteria, that that statement is wrong. Not a matter of taste, but a faulty judgment. There’s a difference between taste and cultivated taste, aesthetic opinion and educated aesthetic opinion.
In other words, I think it’s fairly easy to show that Bach is objectively great.
I’ve been reading Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty, so I need to let that settle before I try to work with the objective/subjective distinction.
This is really muddying the waters… but is it really that easy to prove that Ron Howard isn’t a great filmmaker? I have no opinion of his work, as I am not much of a movie-goer. But I think there is at least a plausible case to be made for his work on the basis of popular appeal. I don’t mean to say that Britney Spears is better than, say, Miles Davis because she sold more records last year. But his work obviously strikes an emotional chord with a mass audience. And there is something to be said for “speaking to your generation” or representing it in some way.
The best analogy I can think of is something like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Literary types seem to have concluded, of late, that it suffers when compared to other “great books.” But that depends on a certain definition of what art is “for.” Obviously, “Backdraft” is not an influential anti-slavery blockbuster. But I hope my point stands.
totally rational aesthetic system
Which reminds me that Lyndon LaRouche claims to have such a thing, and explicates it in stuff like the following:
These empiricists, and others of kindred spirit, use a reductionist’s notion of mechanics, as Euler and Lagrange did, as a substitute for actual scientific principle. In other words, they perpetrated a simple sort of intentional fraud, the same kind of fraud practiced by the followers of Rameau and Fux, relative to the work of Bach and his followers.
I’m not going to link to the SOB, but you can find it on Google easily enough if you want to be amused by the rest of this farrago, which manages to invoke music, theater, mathematics, physics, and philopophy without betraying an understanding of any of them.
How about Ayn Rand in her own words:
and
and
Perhaps this isn’t the right thread to start a debate on Ayn Rand’s taste in music, but these statements just seem completely wrong to me. In specifics, I would imagine that most people who look Guernica are fiercely effected by it emotionally well before they understand it conceptually (if they ever do). On the other hand, there’s a lot of jazz that listeners enjoy specifically for it’s conceptual purpose (a play on another work, a borrowed time-signature) rather than it’s emotional weight. I’m particularly curious what she would of thought about the “visual distortions” that were created after Rembrandt: a black square can be as emotional as it is conceptual. Hell, even classicists were more concerned with conveying an emotional beauty than with telling a story. So would Rand classify aesthetic beauty into her dichotomous philosophy? The distinction seems completely arbitrary; she might as well have said “If I see something I think about what means; if I hear something I think about how it feels” and saved us all the trouble. Of course, her solution seems to be to just discount anything that blurs this distinction as pre-art or distortion, which get’s us right back to the original point.
There’s a comic book I enjoy recently (is it art?!) where the main character was asked what three things he would save in his apartment if it were on fire and his response was “I only think in two’s”. What a bore that must be.
Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea.
Well, pardon me but that’s just bullshit. It would totally be possible to assign meanings to notes or sequences of notes and then create a composition that, quite literally, “tells a story”.
Also,
Music communicates emotions, which one grasps, but does not actually feel;
WTF is she on about? Activity in the part of the brain that processes music often stimulates activity in the nearby part of the brain that processes/generates emotion. It may not be identical to the activity triggered directly by experience, but it is fundamentally not different in kind. It is “felt” as much as ANY feeling is “felt”.
Pardon me, but this is just typical pedantic horseshit which, typically, reads like a typical person who projects her own subjective reactions to things onto the rest of mankind and then tries to rationalize it as some sort of “objective truth”.
To the world’s great credit and eternal fortune, Ayn Rand’s philosophy never caught on with those capable of really taking over a government. She was a totalitarian and a eugenicist in her heart.
She believed government should be limited to protecting the rights of individuals, and should not, itself, violate the rights of an individual. That is the opposite of totalitarianism and eugenics.
But, Rob, there are those who’ve peeked into Rand’s secret evilheart and divined darkness. She even had a dysfunctional relationship with Nathaniel Branden and called her group The Collective! Aha! That proves she was evil.
All that junk about individual rights was a cover for her tyrannical plans.
You have to admire someone who generates so much controversy so long after her death — she touched a lot of hot buttons. Seriously I know it’s not cool to defend Rand, but she was, and still is, a frigging force to be reckoned with. I could love such a strong and brilliant woman, whether I agreed with her every thought or not.
she was, and still is, a frigging force to be reckoned with.
So was Pol Pot.
Wow, you got me there. That’s true, Freddie. I never looked at it that way.
Glad to be of service.
And, to be fair, Martin Luther King.
Indeed.
only according to her definition of “rights”.
and Rosie O’Donell
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