ART: WHAT A CONCEPT
(Originally appeared in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Spring 2001, v2n2)
With the recent publication of What
Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, Lou Torres and Michele Marder
Kamhi (2000) bid to open wider critical discussions of Rand’s distinctive
theory of art. Naturally, such discussions may involve, in turn,
critiques of Torres and Kamhi’s well-articulated views. To draw you into
one such discussion, I place before you four objects:
An
engineering drawing of a blast furnace
A sketch by
Michelangelo
A paperback
copy of The Fountainhead
A paperback
copy of The Virtue Of Selfishness
I ask you the kindergarten
classification question: which of these things goes with the other? The
obvious answer, that the two drawings go together, and the two books go
together, is very obvious indeed. There is a less obvious answer, and
this is the answer I wish to explore. This answer asserts the
Michelangelo sketch and the Rand novel belong together because they are both
artworks.
As this example shows, the concept
of artwork can pull together some rather unlike things, borrowing them out of
their normal neighborhoods for special attention and honor. This borrowing is
not the sort of extraction that occurred when biologists figured out that whales
were mammals, yanking them out of the fish file folder and plopping them into
the mammal file folder. That extraction was in the nature of a
correction, and involved the permanent removal of whales from the fish
folder. But when we group Rand’s novel and Michelangelo’s sketch under
the classification of artwork, we do not erase their original classifications
as book and drawing. Those remain in place.
Several related concepts sail under
the name of “art,” but the one we are discussing here is the one Rand (1975)
was aiming to nail down when she wrote that: “Art is a selective
recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments”
(19).[1]
Here she was using a concept of art which crystallized during the
Enlightenment, a concept that pulls together a strikingly diverse field of
passionate disciplines (Kristeller 1990, 164-165). She lists the
major branches of art as literature, painting, sculpture, music and
architecture. This list follows an established view. Tolstoy, for
example, presented the same basic list as the ordinary man’s answer to the
question “What is art?” ([1896] 1960, 16) [2]
Just to be clear and distinct,
particularly because I am going to be talking about Rand’s theory of art, I
want to mention two other common concepts that sail under the name of “art,”
both of which were occasionally used by Rand. When she described logic as
the “art of non-contradictory identification” (1961, 154), she was using
art in the broad sense of subtle skill. When she described Vermeer
as “the greatest of all artists” (1975, 48), she was using art in the
restricted sense of drawing and painting.
The kind of art we are talking about
is described by Rand as “art in the esthetic-philosophical meaning of the term”
(1975, 75). I have seen it stuffily referred to as “art proper,”
(Collingwood) and jocularly referred to as art “with a capital A” (Kristeller
1990, 164). In older usage it was often referred to as a plural grouping,
“the fine arts,”[3]
a translation of the French phrase “beaux arts.” However, “fine arts” is
often used to refer exclusively to what Rand termed the “visual arts,” i.e.,
painting, sculpture and architecture (1975, 47).
In this essay I will explore what
belongs in our concept of art. I will discuss what sort of definition is
needed to include those things, and only those things. I will look at the
concept’s boundaries, which are typically gradual and occupied by borderline
cases. I will look at why these boundaries are fought over so fiercely,
and whether anything can be done to stop the fighting. Finally I will ask
whether we actually need the concept of art. I will not cover these
topics exhaustively; rather I will be focusing for the most part on apparent
inconsistencies within Rand’s account of the five main branches of art,
following the principle that an honest thinker’s inconsistencies are
opportunities for growth. Contradictions lead to premise checking, and premise
checking leads to deeper understanding. My methodology will be informed
throughout by two related points of the Objectivist theory of concepts:
First, that concepts and their definitions exist to serve our cognitive
needs. Second, that the mere existence of borderline cases does not
refute the validity of a concept or its definition.
When we generalize about such a
diverse class of items as artworks, we are prone to an annoying sort of
imprecision. We naturally take some members of the class to be more typical
than others, and it is these more typical examples that we tend to keep in
mind when we characterize the class as a whole. So we say, “Birds lay
eggs but mammals bear live young.” When we say this, we have omitted
consideration of the spiny ant-eaters and the duck-billed platypus, which are
indeed egg-laying mammals. When this omission is brought to our
attention, we might correctly reply that the omission was a small one, since
the strange creatures mentioned are the only exceptions to the rule, and since
they are isolated in a special sub-class: the monotreme order of mammals.
In Rand’s account of the arts,
architecture plays the part of the ungainly beast that has trouble fitting
in. She asserts that one of art’s distinguishing characteristics
is that it serves no material end, (16) and that utilitarian objects cannot be
classified as works of art. (74) She defines art as being a
kind of selective re-creation of reality. But she issues a special
exemption: “Architecture is in a class by itself, because it combines
art with a utilitarian purpose and does not re-create reality” (46).
This situation is a bit stickier
than our imprecise assertion that mammals don’t lay eggs, because Rand’s
account involves defining characteristics. The question that arises is:
if architecture does not possess all the essential features of art, how can it
be included as one of the five major branches of art?
I would suggest there are at least
three plausible answers:
1) Architecture is not an art.[4] It is merely like art in
certain ways. Designing a building, after all, is more like designing a car
than it is like painting a picture. It’s best to draw the line between
the imitative arts, which create representations of reality, and the decorative
arts, which enhance the appearance of practical objects.
2) Architecture does in fact
re-create reality, in a very literal way, by completely re-creating one’s
surroundings on a grand scale. Speaking in evolutionary terms, it
re-creates our landscape. (Ust 1995)[5] Rand over-generalized when
she declared that being non-utilitarian was a distinguishing feature of
art. But she wisely did not include this in her definition, so her
definition still holds.
3) The definition needs be
changed. The distinguishing characteristics need to be re-thought.
A well-designed building provide a compelling experience of the architect’s
sense of life. Art is a manmade work created to provide an experience
of the creator’s sense of life.[6]
As for other utilitarian purposes, their presence is not, by itself,
disqualifying. After all, wasn’t The Fountainhead partly designed
as a “propaganda” novel? (Rand, 5 August 1994, in Rand 1995, 157-159).
These answers pivot on two key
issues which we will proceed to examine in turn: the role of re-creation in the
arts, and the problem of utilitarian function in the arts.
It may seem puzzling that Rand’s
aesthetics encounters such a sticky spot on the topic of architecture, since
she had spent a large portion of her life immersed in researching and writing The
Fountainhead, a novel set in the world of architecture. The novel is
very much concerned with proper principles of building, and contains eloquent
descriptions of a building’s power to convey meaning and feeling.[7] However, upon completing The
Fountainhead, she mostly left architecture behind her. Her subsequent
novel, Atlas Shrugged, contains merely a few suggestive architectural
descriptions. Her non-fiction writing on aesthetics contains only sparse
references to architecture. Of her major article on aesthetics, it was
only in the last, “Art and Cognition,” that she addressed the topic of
architecture directly, and even then she suggested that the reader consult the
pages of The Fountainhead to obtain her views.
Up until the publication of “Art and
Cognition,” she had similarly skipped discussing music in her articles on
aesthetics, despite the fact that a composer had been one of the minor heroes
of Atlas Shrugged, and that a description of one of his compositions had
been prominently featured in the novel. The first edition of The
Romantic Manifesto, published prior to the appearance of “Art and
Cognition,” contains almost no references to music. Her characteristic
examples in her earlier essays had been drawn from literature, painting and
sculpture, arts in which the role of re-creation can easily be illustrated.
Architecture and music, of course,
are the “hard cases” for mimetic theories of art, theories holding that
art, at root, is some sort of re-creation of reality. Architecture and
music are typical counterexamples put forward by exponents of expressive
theories of art, theories holding that art, at root, is some sort of emotional
expression of the artist. Rand’s account of art in effect denies that
these are mutually exclusive alternatives, since she includes both sorts of
feature in her account.
Facing these two hard cases, she
summarily grants that architecture is a special exception that does not fit the
“re-creation” model of art. She then goes on to examine in some detail
the “unanswered question” of how music makes us experience emotions. She
develops her own hypothesis, according to which the emotions are a byproduct of
the process of hearing notes and mentally integrating them into melodies.
So that, for example, if your mind can correctly perceive a complex musical
composition, it feels good about itself.
While spelling out her hypothesis,
Rand (1975) makes no attempt to account for music in terms of “re-creation of
reality,” but neither does she explicitly declare that music is not re-creative
(46).[8]
She sees music as creating something radically new in the world, which echoes
our early experience of mastering sense perception. Such echoing might be
taken as a kind of “re-creation,” but it would be a somewhat loose sense of the
term, not the strict sense of offering a representation of the sorts of
entities and actions we might encounter in the real world.
It might appear that music is also
in danger of falling outside of Rand’s definition of art.[9] Torres and Kamhi attempt to rescue music
from this fate, writing that music selectively recreates “vocal expression and
the sonic effects of emotionally charged movement” (89). It is hard to
say what this means in plain language, but it seems to mean that music re-creates
natural behaviors that are like song and dance.[10] This is certainly an attenuated
form of “re-creation”, similar to the sort of “re-creation” of landscape which
architecture may be said to provide. This attenuated “re-creation” does
not square easily with Rand’s statement that “[a]s a re-creation of reality, a
work of art has to be representational...” (Rand 1975, 75).[11]
Such forms of “re-creation” may be based
upon facets of reality to which we have strong emotional responses, but they do
not directly represent such phenomena. Consider, for example, the
difference between a painting of a woodland waterfall, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Fallingwater house. Both works play on our natural responses to
landscape, but the means by which they stir our emotions are quite
different. The painting represents a waterfall, the house harmonizes with
a waterfall.
Whatever music is, it is not
representational in a literal sense. The Greeks, of course, classed it as
an imitative art, since they saw it as imitating emotions. But the
relation between music and emotions does not seem to be one of direct
resemblance, the way a painting resembles a visual scene. There are
indeed a variety of long documented points of correspondence between emotional
expression in music and emotional expression in our minds, voices and
bodies. For example, sad music is generally slow music, and when people
are sad they tend to think, speak and move slowly.[12] There are also evolutionary and
neurological arguments that human musical abilities are based upon the
development of our speech abilities (Enright, 1995).
But after all the points of
correspondence are exhausted, it is clear that there is a huge formal component
to music that is far removed from any natural correlate in speech. The
system of scaled notes, which is the basis of harmony and melody, exhibits
striking mathematical relationships that don’t seem to come into play in normal
human speech. It is hardly surprising that Rand, who regarded melody as
the essential feature of music, was drawn to a mental-mathematical model of
musical enjoyment.
It is this huge formal component with
mathematical underpinnings that has long invited comparisons of music to
architecture, including Schelling’s declaration that architecture is
frozen music, (1859] 1989, §106, 165-166),[13] which Rand echoes in The Fountainhead
when she describes architecture as “music in stone” ([1943] 1968, 529).[14] Torres and Kamhi object that
these are “flawed figures of speech... which ignore that the essence of
music is melodic movement” (2000, 418). Such a complaint simply
misses the point of the comparison. The whole point of a literary
metaphor is to make a striking comparison between apparently unlike things.
If music and architecture are on
opposite sides of the moving / unmoving distinction, they are nonetheless
together on the same side of the representational / nonrepresentational
distinction. If we imagine these distinctions as creating a grid of
possible combinations, we will find that Rand’s five main art forms, as traditionally
practiced, fill all four corners, as seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1:
Moving Motionless
--------------------------------
Representational Literature |
Painting
| Sculpture
--------------------------------
Non-
|
Representational
Music | Architecture
--------------------------------
It is worth noting that the “moving”
art forms are those which evolve out of our sense of hearing. Music must
normally be heard to be appreciated[15],
and literature can be heard. Indeed, the niceties of literary
style depend upon imagining a passage in the “mind’s ear,” whether or not the
words are in fact read silently. The “motionless” art forms are precisely
the visual arts, and they function as “unmoving movers,” since they move our
hearts from a position of stillness.
Torres and Kamhi (2000) correctly
observe that “Those who hold that architecture is an art claim that
esthetically designed buildings produce the same kind of pleasure as works of
art do” (196). Sherri Tracinski (2000, 9), in this vein, observes:
nearly everyone has had an
experience when they walk into a building and they are suddenly hit with an
emotional response, the same sudden reaction one feels when seeing a great work
of art. Most people know that great architecture is ‘speaking’ to them -
that it is sending a profound message about the nature of man’s life.
Jonathan Hale (1994) seems to speak
of a similar emotional experience, but offers a different realm of comparison:
“A great building can give us the same exhilaration we experience in a natural
landscape.” (5)
Torres and Kamhi are committed to
the contrarian view that architecture does not commonly provide such an
experience. They declare, for instance, that “[w]ith few exceptions (most
notably Gothic cathedrals)... the building as a whole is rarely experienced as
an integrated esthetic entity....” (2000,196). This is a telling
sentence, because it concedes that at least some buildings are experienced as
integrated aesthetic entities. If Torres and Kamhi are simply maintaining
that such architectural integrity is rare, they would be in agreement with
Rand. Her fictional hero, Howard Roark, holds that “a house can have
integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom” (Rand [1943] 1968,
132). But Torres and Kamhi see nonintegrated buildings as
normal. Rand sees nonintegrated buildings as abnormal. For her the
prevalence of compromised buildings is an indictment of their particular
architects, never an indictment of architecture itself.
Repeatedly, Torres and Kamhi stake
out theoretical positions about architecture which are opposed to Rand’s views
as put forth in The Fountainhead. Disconcertingly, they do not
even mention most of these points of opposition, and it is not clear whether
they are aware of them. Perhaps in holding that “a fictional treatment
cannot take the place of a philosophic analysis” (2000, 189), they have been
inclined to disregard the philosophic principles that she spells out in her
fiction.
Torres and Kamhi argue that “the
architect is far less autonomous than the composer, painter, poet, or
sculptor. Typically he builds for others, not for himself”[U1] (195). They
do not mention that in response to this line of thought, Rand provides her hero
with one of his better known lines: “I don’t intend to build in order to have
clients. I intend to have clients in order to build” (Rand [1943] 1968,
14). His success in doing exactly this constitutes much of The
Fountainhead’s story line.
Torres and Kamhi express
puzzlement over Rand’s claim that architecture expresses “man’s
values.” Remarkably, they seem unable to find clear examples of
such expression in their brief review of Roark’s buildings as described in The
Fountainhead. Because they quote only fragmentary phrases of Rand’s
descriptions, the power of those descriptions is not allowed to shine through
their disdain. As their one-paragraph tour of Roark’s buildings winds
down, they turn a corner and finish with a flourish: “Finally, and perhaps most
significantly, the Stoddard Temple, the most ‘spiritual’ of Roark’s building...
depends for its meaning on the figurative sculpture at its center” (2000,
197). Perhaps this would be significant, if it were true. As it
stands, this is a fascinating misreading of the novel, because there is nothing
in the novel indicating that the building depends for its meaning on the
statue.[16]
The textual evidence is to the contrary. When Gail Wynand asks, “Was the
building worth the statue?,” Dominique replies: “The statue was almost worthy
of the building” (Rand [1943] 1968, 451).
Torres and Kamhi approvingly quote
Roger Scruton, who characterizes architecture as a “public art”, and who holds
that “The expressive features of architecture are not, and cannot be, of [a]
private kind" (2000, 70). What does such a claim mean?
Consider a secluded private residence, and compare it to a statue in a public
square. In any normal sense, the statue in this case is the more public
piece of art. But something else seems to be meant by Scruton, namely
that it’s literally impossible for an architect to express his own personality
in his work, because architecture is always spiritually anonymous, just the way
Ellsworth Toohey liked it.[17]
Perhaps the best way to answer this is with a single counterexample, the real
life architect on whom Roark’s fictional building style was modeled: Frank
Lloyd Wright. As Jonathan Hale (1994) admiringly writes: “Other
architects often feel overwhelmed in Wright’s presence: the talent is too
superior, the style too personal. And it makes no compromises”
(190).
Why are Torres and Kamhi so bent on
eradicating architecture from the canonical fine arts? Perhaps they don’t
respond much to architecture. Some people don’t, just as some people
don’t care much for poetry. But clearly there is more to it than
that. Perhaps they see architecture as the proverbial camel’s nose in the
tent of the fine arts. If something so “abstract” is let inside, doesn’t
it open the way for non-objective painting and sculpture to barge their way in
as well? If something so utilitarian is allowed to slip through, doesn’t
it open the way for women’s quilts and miscellaneous household objects to
follow after? What were people thinking when they included architecture
in the elevated concept of Art?
Indeed, what could Rand have had in
mind when she declared that architecture expresses man’s values? Tracinski
(1998), an architect herself, puts it succinctly: “Architecture conveys a view
of man indirectly, not by projecting an image of man himself, but by
projecting the proper environment for man to live in” (10-11). This is an
“idealized world” (11) which people can actually enter, and which can provide
for its inhabitants a day-in day-out “underscoring and reaffirmation of one’s
highest values” (22).
If architecture does not “re-create”
reality in the sense of depicting some aspect of it, it nonetheless
“re-creates” reality in the far more literal sense of re-building it around us,
to suit our needs and senses. When a building surrounds us and holds us
in its power, the aesthetic impact can be profound (O’Gorman 1997, 7).
For many people such an experience is more intense than any they receive by
staring at a picture on a canvas. We have deep visceral responses to our
environment in both its natural and man-made forms, and it is upon these deep
feelings that architecture builds its effects.
Tracinski (2000) breaks new ground by
arguing that the architect’s handling of the building’s utilitarian function is
itself expressive of the architect’s sense of life, by embodying a view
of human needs, which are key aspects of human nature. The
building’s aesthetic impact is thus an integrative sum of the building’s
structure, function and ornament. The building’s beauty is not a quality
that is tacked on; rather, the beauty is built in.
At this point it is fair to ask,
what differentiates architecture from lesser design arts? If we are to
honor architecture as a major branch of art, then why not do the same for
automobile design and dress design? I think the answer has partly to do
with what Rand refers to as architecture’s “grand spatial scale” (1975, 46),
and partly to do with the sheer range of expressive issues afforded by a human
habitation. Beautifully designed dresses and cars do display aesthetic
qualities and do make implied statements about what is appropriate to human
beings, but they don’t deliver the overwhelming force that architecture can
provide. The line drawn between architecture and the lesser design arts
is a bit like the line between blue and green: they shade into each other, but
there is a perceived difference nonetheless. Architecture is a
design art, but is selected from among the design arts for elevation into the
concept of high art.
Within the Objectivist aesthetics,
the issue of utilitarian function invites reassessment. On the one hand
Rand says that one of the distinguishing marks of a work of art “is that it
serves no practical, material end...”(16) On the other hand she says that
architecture “combines art with a utilitarian purpose (46). Moreover, the
logical difficulties extend beyond the issue of architecture. Consider
this sentence:
The commercial art work in ads (or
posters or postage stamps) is frequently done by real artists and has greater
esthetic value than many paintings, but utilitarian objects cannot be
classified as works of art. (74)
This raises the question: if a
postage stamp can’t be classified as art, how can it possibly have more
aesthetic value than a painting? How can Rand describe non-art objects as
having “esthetic value” when she defines aesthetics as “the study of art”?
(1982, 4).
Curiously, while Rand asserts (off
and on) that utilitarian function clashes with artistic import, she never
presents an explicit argument in favor of this thesis, and generally treats it
in a relatively off the cuff manner, as a given that seems to require strange
qualifications. I would suggest that it was an inherited premise for her,
that she did not get around to thoroughly checking. However, I believe
there is a valid point underlying the premise.
In some authors the traditional
version of the anti-utilitarian premise can sound like a version of the
mind-body split. Utilitarian functions are seen as bodily weight pulling
down the free flight of the spirit that is art. The element of truth here
is that a painter who has the assignment of painting a postage stamp, is
somewhat constrained as compared to a painter who can paint whatever he
likes. We might expect, and experience would confirm, that the
unconstrained painter will be better able to express his own sense of
life. Nonetheless, there will be exceptions, of various kinds.
One exception from the strictures
against utilitarian function has always been made for murals, such as
Leonardo’s Last Supper. No one seems to have doubted whether
Michelangelo’s ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel truly qualified as art,
despite the fact that obvious external constraints, not really of the artist’s
choosing, were present, and despite the fact that he was painting a ceiling.
Of course, walls and ceilings share in the grand spatial scale of architecture,
which tends to make them rather more powerful than postage stamps.
It is instructive to consider Rand’s
literary strictures concerning didacticism, which may be seen as a kind
of utilitarian function, albeit one devoted to ideological rather than material
purposes. Rand stresses that the intellectual enlightenment of her
readers was not her primary concern. The reason she has to stress this,
of course, is the fact that her novels are remarkably heavy on explicit
philosophizing, and readers understandably perceive her novels to be rather didactic.
“Art is not the means to any
didactic end” (1975, 22), she insists in italics. But on the same
page she writes that art’s “basic purpose is not to educate”, suggesting
that it might at times be a serious secondary purpose, a formulation which has the
advantage of better fitting her own literary practice. Indeed this
formulation better fits a great deal of literature, from Aeschylus to
Dostoyevsky. Her considered view seems to be that a didactic purpose,
when present, needs to be subservient to the work’s overall goal of expressing
its theme, with care taken not to overload the structure of the work with
irrelevant discussions of ideas (162 , 84-85).
In sum, the positive and negative
role of utilitarian function plays out very differently in various art
forms. In architecture, it’s an essential means. In painting and
sculpture, it’s mostly a hazard. In literature, it can be either helpful
or harmful. In music, as in marches or social dance music, it’s simply a
genre, somewhat limiting, but not usually seen as disqualifying. In
Rand’s theory of art, the experience of aesthetic exaltation is simultaneously
seen as being of vital practical value, as providing psychological fuel
for daily existence. Unlike approaches that take the essence of art to be
total freedom from all normal concerns, Rand’s approach is of this earth.
Such an approach has room for utilitarian function when it does not undermine
the art form’s basic technique.
As regards the re-creation of
reality, two senses need to be distinguished. Literature, painting and
sculpture are directly representative, describing or depicting entities and
their actions or attributes. We recognize the core content of these arts
as portraying elements of external reality. The same is not true
for music and architecture, both of which present us with new objects of
experience, which seem to work by means other than simulated portrayals of
external reality.
Nonetheless, all of these arts
provide us with the overwhelming experience of entering into a world created by
the artist. They all create an experiential microcosm based on the
artist’s sense of life. In this sense, as Roger Bissell has tirelessly
argued, all of the major art forms truly re-create reality.[18] Rand’s definition of art, then,
continues to hold, particularly as a definition for the layman, who focuses on
art as a recipient, and who attends primarily to the effects achieved by art.
It may be that from a technical
point of view, from the perspective of the producer, who attends more to the
means by which the arts achieve their effects, we would be better served by
something along the lines of: a manmade work created to provide an
experience of the creator’s sense of life.[19] The difference might roughly
correspond to the difference between Aristotle’s definition of man as rational
animal (which Rand saw as a definition appropriate to the layman) as compared
to contemporary biology’s definition of man as a certain kind of primate (which
Rand saw as perfectly appropriate for biologists) (Rand 1990, 233-235).
If we remove “re-creation” from our
definition of art, it might appear that we lose the ability to suppor the
following argument of Rand;s (2000, 10): “Take a nonobjective
painter. He creates some blobs of paint and proclaims that they are an
expression of his subconscious…. What does his work have in common with
real art, which by definition represents recognizable physical objects?
Only that it hangs on a wall.” However, if we define painting suitably,
we can still make much the same argument: “What does his work have in common
with real painting, which by definition represents recognizable objects?”
Such dismissal by definition, of
course, only carries weight when your listener is inclined to agree with the
definition. But what justifies such a definition? It cannot be
justified simply from the fact that it is soundly based on the traditional,
pictorial, way of painting. I think the answer is that nonobjective
painting communicates about as much as “the decorative arts” communicate, and
that they don’t communicate nearly as much as a pictorial painting.[20] After all, as regards elements of
communication, a picture contains the same elements of form that a design does,
elements such composition, balance, color harmony, and so forth. But the
picture operates on the representational level as well, giving it that much
more impact.[21]
Nonetheless, I think that abstract
designs can resonate with a person’s sense of life. Rand does not
address this question directly, but she does address the related but more
limited question of whether the design element of color can resonate
with a person’s sense of life. In fact, she touches on this question at
least twice, with apparently conflicting results.
On the one hand she argues that
color harmony “conveys nothing beyond the awareness of pleasant or
unpleasant relationships,” explaining that such pleasantness is “a sensory
experience and is determined primarily by physiological causes” (75). But
note her use of the word “primarily” which indicates she thinks there are other
causes as well. For, on the other hand, in describing how a person’s sense
of life is formed, Rand maintains that a person of high self esteem will have a
positive emotional response to “pure colors” whereas a person of low self
esteem will feel emotionally at ease with “muddy colors” (27).
The apparent conflict may be resolved
by granting that color elements do carry some sense-of-life associations, that
these are minor compared to the impact which a painting can provide, but that
they are real nonetheless. Some observers are very sensitive to such
abstract design elements. Consider, for example, Richard Speer (1999),
for example, who writes about the straight-line based designs and bright
primary colors of Mondrian, praising them in Randian terms as signifying the
psycho-epistemology of a logical mind. My take is that Speer is very
sensitive to abstract designs, as some people are, and that he does have a
strong sense-of-life response to Mondrian. After all, if you talk to
people who make their living in graphic arts or industrial design, you find
many who wax enthusiastic over the emotional impact of various designs.
The Objectivist aesthetics does not
have a problem with abstract designs when they are simply offered as
designs. The problem arises when abstract designs are offered as
equivalent to pictorial paintings, when it is contended that Mondrian’s
abstract work is just another kind of “painting,” and that it should be
classified as being basically the same sort of work as Michelangelo’s
paintings. What is deeply objectionable is precisely this putting forth of
the lower as equivalent to the higher, this leveling of values, accompanied by
a foggy array of justifications for why this represents progress.
With the concept of art we isolate,
for study and honor, the highest forms of human self-expression, the forms that
best allow an individual to communicate a felt sense of what really matters in
life. The boundaries of the concept are well populated with borderline
cases, namely all the forms that are somewhat less effective but which share
various elements of expression with high art. In honoring the highest, it
is important that we not dishonor forms of expression that have their own
valued place in human life.
Forms such as painting and music are
sufficiently unlike each other that one might wonder whether it was a mistake
to form this concept of art in the first place. Should they have been
left as a grouping, as the fine arts, rather than being consolidated into a
single concept of art?
Going back to our analogy of animal
classification schemes, it can seem at times that the fine arts are yanked from
their normal backgrounds in something like the way that the grouping of “flying
animals” is yanked from their respective biological orders. How much do
flying insects, birds, bats and pterosaurs really have in common? They
have wings in common, but it is noteworthy that we don’t have a single word for
all these winged things. We get by with a descriptive phrase rather than
a unified concept. Do we really need a single word “art,” then, to refer
to the fine arts?
I think we do. The wings of
dragonflies and the wings of robins evolved separately, in distinct forms of
life. But the fine arts sprung forth as the creation of a single species,
namely ours, with an essential unity of purpose. This underlying unity is
what makes possible the “combination works” in which various art forms function
together as one. It is this unity that makes it possible for us to
form the concept of art. It is our critical and peculiar need of art that
makes it important for us to form the concept, since knowing our needs
is the first step to filling them.
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[1] This sentence appears verbatim on
19, 33, 45, 99. Italicized on 19, which is chronologically first in the
original publishing sequence of the chapters. Cited by Peikoff (1991) as
“Rand’s definition” (417).
definition of art, it is not clear how music can
qualify.” The issue was also raised by Torres and Kamhi (1992a, 4).
Abstract: John Enright examines difficulties in Rand’s concept of art,
particularly in light of fundamental issues raised about architecture by Torres
and Kamhi in their book, What Art Is. Neither architecture nor music presents a “re-creation” in the
narrow sense of the term. Rand insists at times that art cannot involve
utilitarian function, but elsewhere sees such functions as compatible with
aesthetic effect. Enright argues for the aesthetic power of
architecture. In evaluating an alternative definition of art, he views
the concept as invaluable to our understanding of a profound human need.