Questions about Aesthetics and Art

We spoke briefly on Twitter about this. I guess there’s room here to elaborate on my own experiences. It’s not to say that art determines people against their will, if they have one. If you understand your premises and have a grasp of your cognitive functions, art can’t necessarily warp you into a contradicting imbecile. Most people don’t think in these terms, though. Their mind just conforms to the trends swirling around them. They aren’t analytical. It’s not like saying listening to Heavy Metal and finding Opera to be boring means you’re a simpleton and hold bad aesthetics. I *do* believe there is valid subjectivity to individual taste – preferring jazz to country music and the like. But there are themes in art that first introduce and then reinforce bad premises in people’s minds, usually starting from an early age.

To people not used to analyzing their premises, exposure to the themes presented in media can establish a paradigm in their minds. It’s like a filter, or a preconception, or even a prejudice. If the most common depiction the concept of “industry” falls in line with movies like “Avatar” and “Ferngully”, versus Atlas Shrugged, you can imagine the preconception with which a person will regard corporations, industries, business men, and human progress in general. They probably don’t even question it. They don’t analyze where it comes from. They barely understand the consequences. They hold it like a religious belief, floating unanchored by a reasonable foundation. It was just constructed for them by what they’ve been exposed to. They can do this because art expresses themes and values whether we’re aware of it or not, even whether the artist is aware of it or not.

That leads to a definition of art. It’s an expression of value by the artist (lumping in all media creators like authors and composers for the sake of simplicity). Whether it’s just about how pretty something is, to whatever emotion they’re trying to engender, or whatever theme they want you to consider as profound and important. Rand used the example of a beautiful woman entering a ballroom. If you were at the party and saw a beautiful woman in a lovely dress enter a ballroom and she had a little cold sore on her lip, you could easily dismiss it as a common little imperfection not important to her character. But if you were looking at a painting of a fictional woman of great beauty and the artist added a cold sore on her lip, it would have intentional meaning. The artist would be going out of his way to put a blight on an example of human beauty. It would be the detail that sums up the expression of the entire piece. Abstract smears passing as art is the artist’s expression of vagueness, or nothingness as a value. At worst it’s an expression requiring the interpretations of others to give his piece meaning. And the nature of the beholders giving “meaning” to a smear on a canvas… I shouldn’t have to elaborate. “The Fountainhead” used Lois Cook to showcase abstract art. Only it was abstract art in literary form, not in visual form. People can stand around and talk about how profound it is, floating high on an artificial cloud of intellectual superiority. If they *don’t* understand it, it must be profound. To offer a meaningless blank that every beholder can fill in by himself is pointless. They can create meanings the same way without the artist. An artist like this can post a blank canvas in a gallery for the same effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if some have.

Responses to art can be automatic, like emotions. Emotional responses are rooted in the premises we hold that influence our reaction to art. I’ll keep it simple with an example: Having a loved one leave you. A feeling of loss and sorrow is ordinary, because you’ve lost a valued relationship. If you experience anger as an automatic reaction, that anger is rooted in a false premise: my loved one has an obligation to stay with me even if they are unhappy. If this false premise is tackled, understood intellectually, and dismissed, feelings of anger will be less automatic and mitigated over time. It’s root is no longer held as a premise. Bear in mind, this isn’t something that happens in a day once you decide, but over time. I have experience with this. Now, take the book “Ethan Frome”, where a man pursues and affair with another woman while having to look after a sickly wife he’s no longer attracted to. Ethan’s pursuit of a new life with a new lover is constantly thwarted by circumstances and guilt, and is finally cut short by crippling tragedy. The reason a person likes this story, or doesn’t, is significant. Will a person have a “serves him right” kind of reaction, sympathizing with the anger of Ethan’s wife? Will a person have a “well, that’s fate” kind of reaction, agreeing that human happiness is ultimately pointless to pursue? Will they react with “my goodness, that’s horrible”, not liking at all the picture the story paints, and the characters the make it up? All those are based on premises already built within the mind of the reader. If the reader hasn’t built those premises, yet, stories like this can do that for them as they are reinforced by similar themes in other forms of media throughout life.

When I was forced to read “Ethan Frome” as a high school student, I was a Christian. My reaction to the ending was a sense of punishment visited on a man who desired to cheat on his wife. I was happier with this kind of ending than I would have been if Ethan Frome had found happiness with a new lover. This was inculcated in my mind from everything I was exposed to going back to my childhood and I didn’t even think about it. I just accepted it. You didn’t analyze emotional responses. They were “automatic”, right?

Whenever a friend of mind reads an Ayn Rand novel for the first time, I always tell them to talk to me about any questions they have or things they find perplexing. They always inevitably come up against things they don’t get, or a protagonist’s behavior they find objectionable, and it’s always a great opportunity to lead them to their preconceptions and false premises and teach them to analyze more deeply. Those that refuse, well… they’re hopeless. Those that do are truly worth spending time with.

This isn’t to say you can’t find a naturalistic novel entertaining for it’s twists and turns. But in my experience, with I’m entertained by the plot (*not* the theme) of a story like this, I’m only entertained on a very shallow level. When I find stories I love for their themes, I’m moved much more deeply, and develop a greater appreciation for the creator of that kind of media.

On the question of “What is Art?” a commonplace way of thinking of art is that it is beautiful things made primarily for contemplation (as opposed to some other use). For instance, a Google “define: art” search brings up the following: “the creation of beautiful or significant things”

Of course, this definition ignores art that is not beautiful. Someone might execute a work of art poorly. Or, some artist might want to create a product that allows people to contemplate a certain ugliness. Among the top Google definitions, the one that is broader is: “Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions.”

Consider the referents of such a concept. The referents are pretty much the same as Rand would include in her concept of art. However, instead of describing it in terms of emotions, Rand would describe it more fundamentally as arranging elements to present a certain world-view, to say “this is life” or “this is how life can be”, which may then evoke certain emotions.

For Objectivists, I think it is important to recognize the sense in which Rand’s concept of art is not radical at all.

Her way of describing art and exemplifying its role in human life are the place she would disagree with others; but here too, her views are not astoundingly radical. Rand’s unique contribution is in her identification of a certain view of human volition as being a key way to categorize art into Romantic and Naturalistic art.