Alexandra York on Ayn Rand

Navigator: What do you think of Ayn Rand 's aesthetic theories and judgments.

York: Because I grew up in the arts from childhood, and because Aristotle was my idea hero from age 17, my values both aesthetically and philosophically were deeply established long before, in my mid-twenties, I was introduced to Ayn Rand's work. Ergo: my first experience of assessing and appreciating Rand's views was highly empathetic yet fully critical and a far distance from the epiphanies experienced by many who encounter her writing for the first time. Over the years, I have remained in admiration of her brilliance, but I have not always agreed with her. In the overview, I never felt comfortable with her reliance on an individual's "sense of life" to explain one's views on art and others' responses to it. It seemed a too-generalized, catch-all term.

Also, I never cared for her definition of art as "a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments." First, I think art is more a representationof reality than a "recreation" of it. And secondly, her definition does not mention aesthetics at all, which are the means by which one perceives the intentions, values, and style of an artist. I don't love my own definition of art either, but I try to pin down the term a bit more: "Art is an intelligible representation of the world and of people that manifests an artist's conceptual visions in perceptual, aesthetic form."

Navigator: Where would you disagree with Ayn Rand's judgments about artists and artworks?

York: I'll give a couple of examples. I don't think Rand understood Impressionism well at all. If I recall correctly, she called it "silly dots," and I think that characterization is itself silly, even if she meant it to characterize Pointillism rather than Impressionism. Serious Impressionists, understandably rebelling against France's government-controlled Academic school, were working out on canvas many alternative possibilities to the (by then formulized) Western canon of art. Some were also aesthetically exploring David Hume's philosophy—right or wrong—of sense perceptions, which in turn was a response to John Locke's philosophy. Others were trying to incorporate into their work some of the new scientific knowledge about the way the human eye mixes colors. Still others were exploring rhythm, emotions, and mood, trying to incorporate those attributes more directly into their work via brushstroke and color. And even more were simply experimenting with paint that had, at the time, become available in tubes, meaning they could paint en plein air, directly from nature to canvas with fresh "impressions" and sunlight.

In short, new ideas were flowing from everywhere. Just think, for example, of how Monet, who became such a leader during that period, altered his work so significantly after being exposed to Japanese art. It should be noted, too, that all of the best painters of this time were well schooled and skilled in the established Western art traditions, so they had a solid technical base for their experimentation. Whether or not their experimentations were always successful is another question—as usual, some were better and more serious than others. Nevertheless, it was an immensely fertile period aesthetically and ideationally, as new worlds opened up philosophically, scientifically, and geographically.

I agree with Rand that the modernists became thorough nihilists—though even then, some of them were pictorially powerful because they were grounded in the Western artistic techniques. But I find it unfortunate that she seemed to slight the Impressionists. I think that Rand (especially in the field of aesthetics) tended to oversimplify certain things that seemed very clear to her on generalized or limited terms, even when she was not objectively supported by facts that someone more familiar with those subjects would have known.

Navigator: How about Rand's famous tastes in music?

York: Well, another example of my differences with Rand is her off-hand denunciation of Beethoven. To be fair, if I remember correctly (I was in the audience), she said only that his "sense of life" was the opposite of hers. O.K. But I was still astounded at her words because I could only think that she must never have heard his very romantic quartettes.

In any case, Beethoven was one of the greatest composers ever—I think of him in the same category as Shakespeare—because of his range. He explored and expressed a wide spectrum of subject matter; he was not limited; he explored life as he knew it, and in the process he opened provocative avenues into romanticism and tragedy (as musical art forms) and love and anger (as emotions expressed through music) that were profound and profoundly beautiful. Would we denounce the value of the Greek playwrights because they didn't project our "sense of life" in their tragedies?

Here again (in my view) her term "sense of life" as a primary aesthetic judgment is asked to bear too much evaluative weight. Like every other art, music has an objective aesthetic "language" of its own and can be enjoyed and "felt" (depending on how well you understand the "language") via its integration of melody, harmony, rhythm, and so forth, all of which are arranged to express the intent of the composer. Given the delicious and seemingly infinite complexities of music, I feel that many of Rand's writings on music were both too far-reaching and too closely subjective at the same time, sometimes taking on moral rather than aesthetic overtones.

Navigator: To the end of her days, apparently, Ayn Rand loved light classical music, such as French operettas, more than she liked the works of heavyweight composers. Would you say, "That's a valid taste"? Or would you say that such a person was missing out on something important?

York: I would say "both."

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