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We live in an era of artistic censorship that emanates from both the left and the right. Conservatives are concerned with the agenda of leftists who are pushing pornographic materials and books with explicit gay sex depictions in libraries and classrooms across the country allegedly as a way of making students less homophobic and transphobic. These sexualized, so-called educational materials supersede the educational value of any non-politicized material and are being weaponized to convert students into social justice activists. Conservatives are rightly concerned about the proliferation of such works and their availability to young Americans.
On the left, a decolonization movement targets books and works of art by (mostly) men alleged to have been racist, antisemitic, misogynistic and physically abusive towards their female partners. Think here of Pablo Picasso putting out a cigarette on the face of one of his female conquests. Today some colleges issue trigger warnings on books by writers deemed to be racist; galleries refuse to exhibit works by purportedly misogynistic painters; and the music of convicted pedophile pop singer R. Kelly is rarely, if ever, aired on radio stations.
But there is more to the censorious attitude of the left than this. It targets the canonical texts and artworks that constitute the liberal arts education of students and that have, in the past, been prized by both liberals and conservatives alike. These texts and artworks have been part of college curricula for centuries. Today, they stand largely defended by conservatives as a cabal of left-wing educators seeks to extricate them or “decolonize them” from the liberal canon. These works are largely by dead white European males who have been attributed with holding racist and misogynistic views. They range from figures such as Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, John Stuart Mill, Kant, and Faulkner.
The haunting questions that pervade the cultural air are: what do we do with the works of art of monstrous men—both historically and in the contemporary era? Does genius excuse cruelty? Should the peccadilloes of great men be overlooked?
In her magisterial and brilliant new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, critic Claire Dederer takes on these questions and, in the process, helps us to navigate the culture wars with great lucidity and common sense.
The book examines the lives of great artists such as Pablo Picasso (a documented misogynist and violent abuser of women); Woody Allen (who committed psychological incest by marrying his step-daughter); Doris Lessing (who abandoned her two children in what was then Rhodesia to live the free life of a writer in London); Roman Polanski (who raped and sodomized a thirteen year old girl); Miles Davis (a self-admitted monster who beat his women and prevented his wife from pursuing a dance career of her own); Sylvia Plath (who committed suicide and abandoned her children), and others such as Virginia Wolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Anne Sexton. In each case, the transgressions of the artists were so appalling that they have called into question whether continued consumption of their works is even moral.
Dederer is a master at analyzing the lives of these artists and their works. The chapter on Genius alone is worth the price of the book. One dilemma that stands in need of resolve is this: Do great works of art require flawed and cruel personalities; in general, monsters? Or do the monsters who are themselves already great artists have to create great works of art to atone for the horrific creatures they are, and the lives they have ruined in the pursuit of their art?
Dederer is a compelling storyteller, and the book is a page turner. She is adept at making the connection between genius, madness, and great art. She carefully addresses such questions as: Why is it that, generally speaking, happy people do not create great art? Why is great art birthed from mutilated and twisted egos?
An added bonus to the book is that it is part memoir. Dederer knows that she is not a genius; nevertheless, she is driven and ambitious and possessed of a desire to write a great book. She worries, as did Sexton, Plath, and Lessing, that the domestic demands of motherhood, the selflessness that comes with motherhood, and the quest for artistic greatness if one is a mother are all incompatible. On several occasions after examining ways in which she has comported herself in relation to her children, her own previous abuse of alcohol to both hide pain and spur on writing, and her monomaniacal drivenness, she asks herself: Am I a monster? Her answers are both nuanced and deeply insightful.
But back to the book’s relevance to the culture wars. Many of us fight these wars from the standpoint of moral self-righteousness, as if we ourselves now have the requisite moral vocabularies and enlightened consciousness to avoid the moral mistakes our erstwhile favorite artists committed. We move in the world with this idea along with the attendant moral judgment not to consume the contested artwork. Dederer writes:
We attempt to enact morality through using our judgement when we buy stuff, but our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us trapped in the spectacle, because we believe we have control over it. What if instead we accepted the falsity of the spectacle altogether?
Condemnation of the canceled celebrity affirms the idea that there is some positive celebrity who does not have the stain of the canceled celebrity. The bad celebrity, once again, reinforces the idea of the good celebrity, a thing that doesn’t exist, because celebrities are not agents of morality, they’re reproducible images.
The fact is that our consumption, or lack thereof, of the work is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture.
Cancel culture and quarrels with terrible and monstrous artists come to an end when we stop looking outward at the world and look to the very people whom we love. The whole act of righteous indignation of wicked artists is a sham, really. Derderer asks us to look at the monstrous people in our own families that we love: our children, our parents, and our siblings. What about close friends? What do we do about the terrible people we love? Do we excise them from our lives? Do we enact a justice swift and sure? Do we cancel them? Sometimes. But more often than not we don’t. As Derderer explains—families are hard because they are monsters (and angels and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They are unchosen monsters. And yet we mostly end up loving our families anyway.
So, the broader ethical and existential question is: what do we do about the terrible people we love? And that question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be before people stop loving us?
If we can extrapolate from the family institution to works of art and books and artists that we love, then why can’t we apply grace? Why can’t we admit that they have the same frailties and weaknesses as we do? And why can we not see that by some strange and inexplicable alchemy via an admixture of their very ugly demons and tormented psyches coupled with an exalted vision—that beauty magically arises from their souls into something called “a work of art?”
Derderer is neither a sentimentalist nor an idealist. She understands the inescapable messiness of love; that it is mediated by both the beauty and the horrors of life. She does not ask us to forgive the cruelty of great artists any more than we are asked to forgive ourselves for our own cruelties and the manner in which we use them to harm others. We make those choices guided by our conscience. Rather, there is a better remedy, one that is more mature and humane. She writes:
Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love the flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.
Nice article Jason, thanks! My worst enemy was a leftist/satanist from the New York art community so I have a lifetime of suffering from that sector that I experienced.
My worst enemy is myself lol.
Maybe I’ve been lucky, no, I certainly have been, but nobody else has come near the damage to me that I have done.
I was certainly my worst enemy in one sense, namely in believing what I was told, and then acting on it. The outside world is a mix of good and bad, truth and lies, and one needs to exercise one’s intellectual discrimination to discriminate between truth and lies.
‘My worst enemy was a leftist/Satanist…’ Lol! So you are going to make a statement, like that, and just leave us all, on the edge of our seats?
Well, her technique was interesting. Spreading lies about me to everyone in our circle, some of which still persist today.
Very sorry to hear that AA – Office politics can be so brutal and damaging. And we have to earn a living. So our lives can be made a misery by that kind of person.
Interesting that you say she was a Satanist though. I guess that was one honest thing about her. Because didn’t Jesus himself call Satan “the father of the lie”?
Thanks Sue, excellent observation! I was thinking about that also, Satan being the father of the lie.
Thanks for the support and understanding.
Thank you, Jason, for your insightful and inspiring review!
Or do the monsters Become monsters because of the fame and fortune which puts them in a position of power over their victims.
Never a big fan of Picasso – as a child photos of him somehow gave me the creeps- I nevertheless assumed he was ‘great’ as thats what was said about him.
I went to an exhibition of his work – his erotica- by invitation some years ago with people from work.
The images were of violence to women, to women’s private body parts. The depictions were not beautiful or particularly artistic, just disgusting. This man spent time drawing, painting such images. If such images were made by a student in a school. for example, the authorities would be called and referrals made for mental health treatment.
So did I then see Picasso as a monster? Oh, yes. As an artist? Not for me, no.
Personally I have always suspected that either Picasso was overrated or I don’t understand art. But since my father was an artist and encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the arts and especially the history of painting, I think I do understand art; thus my opinion of Picasso might just be correct. Let others excoriate me and call me a philistine, I’ll stick to it. If Vermeer’s modest opus is my standard for good painting, then very few, especially in the 20th century and later, live up to him.
“The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelationships feature, lead to and make possible the painting’s brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.
(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer’s work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.)
One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power—a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: “This is my view of life,” the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.” – Ayn Rand
Hello again THX – We will have to stop meeting like this, or, Take me to your leader, or Whatever cliche seems appropriate.
You say: “Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer’s work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.”
An excellent point. But isn’t that in harmony with Genesis rather than the Evolutionary account of our origins, in that Genesis tells us that far from evolving, far from becoming more viable, we are in a continuing fall from a perfect state?
And, re Dr Hill’s interesting article, I don’t see that even the greatest work of art is worth one act of cruelty
I taught art and art history (college) for 44 years. I do think a case can be made that Picasso is regarded as a great artist as much owing to self-promotion as to the work itself. Much of Picasso is tiresome, bizarre performance—shoulder-shrug stuff. “Guernica,” however, is justifiably regarded as a significant work, but many recognize that Picasso did not paint an important work after 1939. There is some evidence that Picasso was well aware of his own modest stature as measured against the works of the great masters like Titian, Veronese, Rembrandt, Vermeer. If one wants to study the art and craft of painting, one would better look to those artists than Picasso.
Thanks Lightbringer and CAT! I just remembered something. After WW1 there was a reaction against the beauty of classical art, blaming it for bringing on the disasters of WW1. So artists depicted a lot of chaos and ugliness instead. Picasso was good at that, gross, ugly, misshaped, distorted figures. Hallucinogenic nightmares.
Dederer’s book sounds like a confused mess. She starts with a flawed premise by accepting that modern art is valuable then builds her arguments from there. I’m inclined to accept the classical Aristotelian aesthestic sensibility that would discount the work of the modern art project altogether. Picasso is not even in the same league as Da Vinci. Picasso’s behavior is that of a depraved individual and not to be excused because of some cockamamie notion of his “genius.”
A great, and thought provoking article, “but I repeat myself.” (S.C.) You left out marx though, who was a terrible human. But it was his ideas, his most popular ‘art,’ that I found repusive and near completely wrong and destructive of the good. His personal monstrosity was just icing on the cake.
The link between insanity, suffering, and great art is too thick and near constant to be ignored. And I discovered, for some reason I love the music of heroin addicts. From Ray Charles to Jerry Cantrell, many of my favorite songs were created by them, and it’s always mystified me.
I’ve never done heroin. Processed heroin and needles are among my hard limits. But I did smoke an opium dipped Thai stick once in the 80s, and understood Poe like I never did before. I think the hair-ron addicts’ music is great enough that I don’t need a more complete understanding. Like Poe, they probably did a great job of conveying what they thought or sensed, which is what art is all about.
The two composers whose music I love most to play are Haydn and Mozart. Both of them, especially Haydn, were very happy and well-adjusted human beings. Both were musical geniuses and great innovators. So much for having to be a tortured genius to produce great art.
I wonder, if the elites, Woody Allen is a monster movement has any antisemitic element? Our yankee east coast WASP have always been somewhat anti Jew?
Could be, although Allen is more than a little bit of a self hating Jew himself (he’s also suffered long artistic droughts during which he continued to direct films that were not successful, commercially or artistically). The Left is full of Jewish antisemites, many of whom (such as the living members of Sulzberger Ochs clan at The New York Times) aren’t really even Jewish anymore. Interestingly, other antisemites (such as Roald Dahl) haven’t been declared anathema by the Left. And Vanessa Redgrave’s reputation among the bien pensant (vastly overrated- the way they carry on, you’d think she were a reincarnation of Eleanora Duse or Laurette Taylor) is unsullied in spite of her antisemitism, or the fact that spent decades in The Worker Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyite Political Cult led by serial rapist Gerry Healy. When the scandal could no longer be contained within the cult, Redgrave held a press conference in which she pronounced all the rape victims liars.
Woody Allen is a pathetic excuse for a Jew, and an anti-Semite himself. He is also no artist. Let’s stop cutting him so much slack — he’s a poseur who makes fun of Jews for the delight of other anti-Semites.
What an effin, sick, depraved, definition of love. Sick, sick, sick.
By this definition of love Eva Braun and all the German Nazis were gloriously and admirably in love with Hitler.
Psychologically, emotionally, evil, sick, wounded, or insecure people do become intensely attracted to, attached, and dependent on other sick, evil, wounded, or insecure people, but that properly and objectively speaking is not love. It’s psychological, emotional, dependency, an emotional addiction, but it is not love. It’s closer to hatred than love.
And even if 99.99% of all people were that way, it’s still not love. It was probably that way for 99.99% of prehistoric men. Love had to be discovered and defined by the geniuses of love before the masses of prehistoric troglodytes knew it could exist.
“There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”
― Francois La Rochefoucauld
“So far as we can ascertain, in primitive cultures the idea of romantic love did not exist at all…. The concept of romantic love as a widely accepted cultural value and as the ideal basis of marriage was a product of the nineteenth century…. On the deepest level Christianity has always been a fierce opponent of romantic love.” ― Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Romantic Love
What the hell do you, or any Objectivist, know about romantic love, considering the hash Ayn Rand made out of her life when it came to her marriage and her affair with Brandon.
Best move Brandon made was ditching the witch.
And yet both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden (the only two people from whom we have the allegations of the affair) remained staunch supporters of reason and Objectivism until their dying day. Branden may have ditched Ayn Rand but he never ditched reason for faith.
“The highest tribute to Ayn Rand, is that her critics must distort everything she stood for in order to attack her. She advocated reason, not force; the individual’s rights to freedom of action, speech, and association; self-responsibility, NOT self-indulgence; and a
live-and-let-live society in which each individual is treated as anEND, not the MEANS of others’ ends. How many critics would dare honestly state these ideas and say, ” . . .and that’s what I reject”? –Barbara Branden
Allegations? Really? It was documented in a TV production about 20 years. Helen Mirren played Rand.
If it the affair had been faked Brandon probably would have sued.
You have hitched your three wheeled wagon to a dead end road.
According to the Brandens there were only four people privy to the affair, the O’Connors and the Brandens. And they were all voluntary, consenting, adults who discussed the possibility of Rand and Branden having the affair. Rand and Branden told their spouses that the affair would not proceed without their consent, their spouses, after several long meetings, gave their consent.
If the affair happened it does nothing whatsoever to invalidate the truth of Objectivism, in fact it would support Objectivism. No man, according to Objectivism, is either omniscient or omnipotent. At any moment in his life a man can make mistakes, bad choices, bad judgement calls, and even become irrational and evil.
It figures you would carry water for people you don’t know and don’t know or care about you.
It figures you would say that, even if they did engage in their depraved behavior, it doesn’t invalidate the “truth of objectivism”. Truth? Really? Sounds like a mindless religious cult.
That is the equivalent of saying even though Hitler gassed and murdered six million Jews it doesn’t invalidate the reason as to why he attacked the countries he attacked and all of the other misery he caused.
As to the so-called “truth of objectivism”, that is simply your opinion, not remotely borne out by any evidence of general acceptance by anyone who has standing in the field of actual philosophy.
Have fun being Rand’s fan boy. Let’s go Ayn! Let’s go Ayn!!
By Jove! You’re stupider than a rock! Go and try to learn logic and reasoning.
You criticize definitions of love, so this means there must be an ideal standard. How does the objectivist define love?
“No reason for love, no season for love” 🙂
Not that I know much about it, being the most extreme advocate of reason. The thing is, God is beyond reason, no matter how much one knows about God, there is always just a little bit more 🙂
“In the Age of Reason, the dichotomy between reason and passion was resurrected in full force. The hallmark of the intellectual was contempt for emotions. Love, wrote Jonathan Swift, is a “ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances. For Sebastian Chamfort, love was nothing but “the contact of two epidermises.”
In rebellion against the alleged exalted values of religion which led to repression, people turned against the concept of exalted values in earthly human relationships — and did so, tragically, in the name of reason. Intellectuals of the period did not challenge religion’s monopoly on exaltation and ecstasy; they merely surrendered exaltation and ecstasy.
But like previous cultures that assumed an inescapable conflict between reason and emotion, between spiritual-intellectual values and passionate-physical experience, the culture of the Age of Reason found itself obsessed with the passions it tried to discount.” – Nathaniel Branden, “The psychology of Romantic Love”
Age of reason? God created the universe, endowed his human creation with free will, and sent a redeemer to save those who accept the gift of love. Reason has nothing to do with the fate of our race. Those who call following God’s way repression are blind, just as those who call the wisdom of His love folly are fools. When the day of judgment arrives, the “wise” of our world will stand naked and convicted, condemned to eternal perdition. They will find their disdain of the immutable laws of our creation to be their very condemnation.
You quote Nathaniel Branden, née Blumenthal, as your source of objectivist love definition.
I find it very interesting that he mentions only contrasts between reason and passion. Does this mean your definition of love is synonymous with “passion” and that passion is sexual and unreasonable?
Yes, love can be sexual, but does that define it? Yes, love can be unreasonable, but does that define it?
Defining love is difficult. Thank you for giving it a stab, THX.
Is cribbing the blatherings of others the only way you can express yourself.
My guess is you probably have never been in any kind of actual relationship.
“By Jove! You’re stupider than a rock! Go and try to learn logic and reasoning.”
I absolutely love it when I get to you and you react on a purely emotional level. As if you and your “PhD” have cornered the market on logic and reasoning.
I guess we aren’t allowed to criticize anyone connected with Objectivism, are we.
Have fun being Rand’s fan boy. Let’s go Ayn! Let’s go Ayn!!
So interesting. Can read your quote two very opposite ways. No reason or season, so no anticipation or participation – a kind of indifference. Or the opposite — a free-for-all smorgasbord of romantic / erotic expression. Both of which are not very romantic or erotically appealing to me.
God identifies Himself in the Gospel of John as the “Word” or “Logos.” “Logos” can be accurately translated in context as “Reason.”
But God is safely understood as completely Other. Reason is not “other” to us, but God is certainly beyond whatever we might frame with the use of our reason.
Perhaps it will be one of the eternal joys we have to continue to increase in the knowledge of God’s perfect otherness.
Love, like hate, is an emotion. It’s universal among humans and across cultures, though some cultures place different values on it, and some don’t openly acknowledge it at all.
Then there’s the expression of love. My dad was harder on me than anyone else. But he loved me more (except mom) and expected more of me than anyone else. My longest and closest romantic relationship (about 25 years), was with someone most would think hated me, if they only saw us in public. When she said, “I hate you,” she meant “I love you,” and her actions bore it out. It was a game for us. I could get on her last nerve more than anybody, because she really loved me, warts and all.
The Greeks were the first I know of to specify the different kinds of love. The Greeks were certainly aware of eros love, along with paternos, and fraternos love, and the relative hatreds go back to Judaic Cain and Able. Lust has been recognized even longer. I think you narrow your focus to objectivism, and thus miss a lot of good, if not entirely rational, about us humans. Is it rational to take that hill against near suicidal odds, or fight to the death for the one you love?
We’re complex creatures, God and the universes he created designed us that way.
” Is it rational to take that hill against near suicidal odds, or fight to the death for the one you love?”
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t….
If a man dies fighting for his own freedom [and those he loves], it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing….
Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.” – Ayn Rand
I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country. I recognize a moral responsibility to my freedom and liberty and the freedom and liberty of those I love. — THX 1138
That about sums you up.
“In the history of mankind [and love] it is EARLIER than we think…
Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut….
Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man’s life.” – Ayn Rand
Rand: “Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.”
KH: Interesting way to express love as a selfish pleasure. If love is a “spiritual payment” given to another, I would think the one receiving it would need to cherish it – otherwise there is no payment. Unless you see “payment” as having value simply because it comes from you?
Rand: “Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut….”
KH: Again, interesting way to shoehorn love into the “selfish” arena. Defining love is difficult, but I think it is made much more difficult when one tries to make it fit into a category bounded by selfishness.
The way love is defined by Rand makes love all about the lover, and not the beloved. Do I misunderstand?
You’re misunderstanding Rand. Love is a two way street, it requires two people worthy of each other’s love. It requires rational selfishness on the part of both lovers. Your mistake is that you are thinking of selfishness in the conventional sense of the word, not in the Objectivist sense of the word.
“The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind….
To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.” – Ayn Rand
“The Virtue of Selfishness” is available for free in PDF on the internet, a used copy can be yours for $1.50 at Amazon. You might be able to borrow a copy at your local library.
“The Psychology of Romantic Love”, “The Psychology of Self-Esteem”, and “Honoring the Self” by Nathaniel Branden are excellent books to learn about rational selfishness.
“In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive” by Objectivist Peter Scwartz is a very good book that gives further insights and examples. It ties abstract theory to concrete examples in an easy-to-understand way. A used copy can be bought for $4 at Amazon. Your local public library may have a copy.
Thank you for your response, THX.
Rand’s definition of altruism is a good one, but “selfishness” need not be a special word. YES, I agree there are times when selfishness is good – but can it not also be bad? The word requires context to judge its goodness or badness. We do not need a new definition of the word (like a cult), but a context. Am I wrong?
And, of all things, love cannot be concerned only with the self. And love does not or should not require self-abnegation. Agreed?
I find objectivism compelling in some ways, but its implications are very terrible when extrapolated to society. It is deeply religious and dogmatic in its foundational presuppositions which are both unreasonable and unscientific – surely an insurmountable fatal flaw relegating objectivist philosophy to one of personal preference rather than inescapable fact and reality (as it claims).
How on earth could anyone “misunderstand” Rand or Brand. After all they pen such clear gobbledegook. And so exciting too. Nothing like curling up with Atlas Shrugged for the one millionth time, while the football game is on.
Watch out. He is giving you homework to waste your time with.
Yes, but I am dealing with the words on the screen in front of me. If those are unsound, I do not go into the background. I thought of you today and hoped you were having a beautiful worship service.
Thanks for asking.
Saturday evening was better. The opening Hymn was “In Christ Alone”. The sol0ist was a an excellent violinist. So I asked our organist if I could accompany them and she said of course, but I added the caveat that if the soloist said no I would back out.
Well, everything went great on Saturday. The music soared. My wife was smiling as was our small choir. I played my part perfectly.
Sunday morning…not so good. I screwed up the transition between D major and E major and dropped three measures. So I was sitting there beating myself up until someone from the congregation said “Beethoven said ‘a mistake is nothing. It’s only when you play without passion that it becomes a tragedy.’ ” At any rate, apparently I was the only one who heard the gaffe.
But it was also my wife’s birthday and I had two Scotches at dinner. We went to Firebirds.
I still hate making mistakes though.
Only Rand and you would sit around analyzing the ins and outs of a romantic relationship.
And of course Rand was no expert in the affairs of love. Her marriage failed.
There’s an old saying: “Love the art, not the artist.” Many artists of all stripe have been miserable people. Liking their works does not equate to endorsing or supporting their personal lives.
Let me ignore the rather odd definition of love at the end, which sounds more like obsession–neurotic obsession to be exact.
Coming back to boycotting the product of nasty people, if they’re dead I don’t see the purpose. If they are alive, one might have qualms, not so much a utilitarian/consequentialist matter, but out of self-respect.
Even when I avoid patronizing someone, I never urge others to boycott. Let each person’s conscience be a guide.
whatever one thinks of woody allen he was not a STEP FATHER to mia’s children. They were not married and it is well known he never spent a night in her place wishing to keep a distance between himself and the family for whatever reasons were his own. Friends say he did not want to co-opt role as some kind of parent out of respect to Andre Previn. I personally believe he just was disinterested in kids. He only got to know Soon Yi due to Mia’s request he spend time with her as an older adolescent. There was no incest here in any form. Very unclassy behavior to be sure but time to give it a rest as he has been married to her close to 30 years. He was more than willing to take a lie detector test at police station when she made a scandal she was not and police there were quite suspicious of her behavior. He did not have a commitment to her in any formal way all he is guilty of is being a “creep”.
I wish I knew why people love his movies. The only Woody Allen movie I’ve ever loved was his first one “Take the Money and Run”.
I can still remember being a child and being in absolute stitches and tears, uncontrollably belly-laughing, and rolling on the floor in front of the TV.
I wish I could still laugh like that; I would probably need to smoke marijuana for that kind of uncontrollable, childish laughter.
Okay, I’ll agree that that one is funny, in its own anti-Semitic way. But his other stuff is trash, as is he.
Or you would need to be in a relationship with someone who could make you laugh, but I doubt that is possible, old man.
He was accused (with creditable witnesses to inappropriate conduct) of the sexual molestation of SEVEN year old Dylan Farrow. You seem to be forgetting that one. He also was good friends with one Jeffrey Epstein. He was so “disinterested” in Dylan, he tried to win custody.
“On the left, a decolonization movement targets books and works of art by (mostly) men alleged to have been racist, antisemitic, misogynistic and physically abusive towards their female partners.”
Not only that, the left is targeting Japanese video game franchises, anime series, and manga series alleged to be “demeaning” towards women because they depict attractive female characters and attract the male gaze. Feminists on the left have managed to get the famous fighting game series Dead or Alive – a series known for it’s attractive female characters, to tone down the sexiness of the females to please them and other young and insecure leftists. The left is trying to attack fictional characters and entertainment mediums that appeal to straight men in an attempt to promote their pro-Trans, pro-LBGT, and pro-radfem agenda of destroying heterosexuality and destroying the family.
Hence it is important that conservatives get involved and take back the arts from the far left after abandoning them in the 60s.
Interesting point. Feminine beauty threatens Feminism because, according to them, it reduces a woman to a mere object. What they don’t get is that beautiful women are admired because they are admirable. Admiring them does not objectify them, it respects their pride in themselves. It’s that simple.
This is a great article; my only quibble is that it doesn’t make sense to include Sylvia Plath in a list of morally questionable artists. Since when is suicidal depression monstrous?
A good epilog to this article would be Tom Wolfe’s book “The Painted Word.” An ascerbic take on the New York modernist art scene of the 1960’s.
Not one of the named individuals in this article is a great artist. While it may be true that great art comes from flawed individuals, that is not remarkable, since none of us is free from sin. But holding up these men and women as great artists is folly, when compared to Michelangiolo, Dante, Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or even the unknown 20th Century designer of pipe organs, Roy Perry. It is the collapse of Christendom that has enabled the mediocrities cited in this article to gain renown.
A previous generation believed that Va Pensiero was that last great song ever composed. It’s hard to argue a better one has arisen since.
I regret to say that this article and the book it reviews are total bullshit. The modern tendency of “artists” to also be depraved, emotionally damaged and sometimes outright dangerous types is attributable to the zeitgeist which has replaced humanity’s proper worship of God with self-worship. This results in shallow, ego-driven neurotics being given the stage upon which to act out their worst inclinations and being lionized for doing so. I do not recall any such agonizing over the genius of Michelangelo or any of the great painters and sculptors of Europe’s renaissance, or Shakespeare and the other geniuses of the literary field. It is only in our modern age, in which we have banished God from public thought that we are being faced with this false choice of monster/genius.
Thank you for saying so.
If you want neurotic, emotionally damaged, man-hating, life-hating, art of horror then you need to study medieval Christian art.
Renaissance art represents the rebirth of reason not the rebirth of Christian faith. Renaissance art represents Christianity losing its death-grip on the Western mind and Western civilization waking up from the nightmare of medieval Christianity.
Our modern age is once again abandoning reason for unreason and men are losing their minds as they did during the Christian Dark Ages.
“An entirely different view of man dominated the medieval Christian civilization. Man, according to Augustine, is “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous.” Medieval mystics regarded man as an evil creature whose body is loathsome because it is material, and whose mind is impotent because it is human. Hating man’s body, they said that pleasure is evil, and virtue consists of renunciation. Hating this earth, they said that it is a prison where man is doomed to pain, misery, calamity. Hating life, they said that death and escape into some other dimension is all that man could—and should—hope for.
Man as a helpless and depraved creature, was the basic theme of medieval sculpture until the Gothic period, whether he was shown being pushed into Hell or accepted into Heaven.” – Mary Ann Sures
“Metaphysics In Marble” by Mary Ann Sures
You couldn’t find great art during art period of man with two hands and a flashlight. No doubt Rand hated everything you hate, so you hate because she did.
The people you quote are always the damaged ones. Have you noticed that. Says a lot about you.
I would expect nothing else from a deluded Randian “Objectivist.” Your ill-founded disdain for Christianity and desire to elevate your vaunted intellect will end in your demise, physically and spiritually. For this, I feel deeply sorry.
What everyone ignores in this thread is that art follows money. It always has. Want to know why our modernism is so depraved? Follow the money.
Art and money follow philosophy (religion is an early form of philosophy). Why is there so little art in Islam? Because much of art is prohibited by Islam, no amount of money is going to make a Muslim culture produce any kind of art.
“Most German industrialists were not pro-Nazi prior to 1933; to them almost any kind of regime, including the Republic, was acceptable. Nor were business contributions to the Nazi cause a significant factor in Hitler’s success, which is an ideological, not a financial phenomenon. (Money makes it easy to disseminate propaganda; it cannot define the ideas to be propagated or determine the country’s receptivity to them.)” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
Why is there no art in Objectivism. Possibly because it is bereft of an essential ingredient….. humanity….kind of like Communism and Nazism.
Totalitarianism tends to do that to the arts.
And please, don’t get on your high horse about anti-man Medieval art versus man-loving Renaissance art. Your opinions are worthless.
1890’s French artist Felicien Rops was notorious for his artwork and prints positively dripping with depraved sensuality and evil. His friend and art dealer Vuillard came to visit him at his studio when Rops was older. They chatted but Rops told him “I have a woman coming, when the bell rings three times go out this back door.” Vuillard later on heard the three bells and went out the back door but paused long enough to see Rops elderly house keeper enter and say “Your tisane (herb tea) is ready Monsieur, drink it now or it will get cold.”
The greatest works of art are those who spend their lives in pursuit of self conquest. These are the happy few, who perfect themselves morally. Modern “great” artists are consigned to create exterior to themselves since their interior lives are barren. Few saints are great artists, with exception being St Juan de la Cruz.
It’s hard to express how many ways this rationale is mismatched.
“If we can extrapolate from the family institution to works of art and books and artists that we love…” But we can’t.
We DON’T love artists the way we love family – it’s a different class of “love” altogether. Artists don’t have a claim on us that our family does.
Celebrities don’t have a claim on us that artists do.
Not every celebrity is an artist. And actually, very few good artists are celebrities.
And artistic genius doesn’t have to be twisted or mean.
(think CS Lewis or JS Bach)
And not all families have monsters for members. For those that do, the circumstances are so varied you can’t possibly generalize the way this author did.
And we AREN’T morally required to “apply grace” to people (artists or family) who celebrate their “very ugly demons”. Grace goes to those who are *fighting* their demons. That’s who morally healthy people identify with.
We can’t separate the art from its maker. “Out of the heart the individual speaks.” Artists create images of their souls. If you embrace the art, you have embraced the artist. Their flavor stays in your spirit.
“Tormented psyches coupled with an exalted vision” will produce “beauty” only if their suffering is transformed by their vision.
If their vision is dragged down into their suffering, it suffocates. And no matter how much technical talent that artist may have, he/she will only portray their vision’s death throes – with technical brilliance and originality.
Which makes the death that much more depressing.
Except for those who enjoy the idea of death and decay without resurrection.
Great art is transcendent – it takes us to a higher place. A work that celebrates the ugly and perverted as “beautiful” and “liberating” is dehumanizing. It goes in the opposite direction of transcendent.
Most of all, Love is NOT “chaos” or “anarchy” or a suspension of judgment.
It is the Cosmic Opposite of all those things.
Ultimate Love is about entering the broken world and slaying the lies in order to make the wrongs right.
Any art that imitates this Love will reawaken our human instincts of what “great” means. Then we realize what a delusion we’ve been living with.
PS.
Cancel culture is not attacking the truly monstrous (IF ONLY!). They simply brand whatever offends them, by a standard that changes with the wind.
To me they are the least relevant in a debate about art and morality. They are in fact a parody of the word “culture”.