Ayn Rand's Dippy Art Theory (and some fun schtuff too)

Jillian Steinhauer's "Ayn Rand's Theory of Art," which Hyperallergic ran a couple months ago surprised me, because I would have guessed Rand's ideas about art would be dull, but I had no idea how utterly impoverished they would seem.

A 539 page book that Steinhauer admits she didn't buy and only read in chapter summaries and excerpted bits, I might someday see if I can get my hands on a library copy to see if it's as thoroughly ridiculous as it seems, after reading what Steinhauer gleaned from it.

                                  Kandinsky's Unbroken Line (1923), which is NOT art,
                                 according to Ayn Rand, because it's not representational.
                                 Interestingly, the Nazis had a similar esthetic.

Presented as a "groundbreaking alternative view" of Art, contra the Art Establishment, it seems that Rand only thought representational art in painting, sculpture and drawing was legitimate. Apparently there were other ideas about poetry and novels. But let's learn about what IS NOT art from Rand:

1. any and all abstract art (remember: it must be representational!)
2. photography (fuck you, Ansel Adams!)
3. any sort of crafts from indigenous peoples (why? I'd like to know)
4. John Cage and Merce Cunningham (big surprise)
5. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (it seems likely that Robert Anton Wilson was going around calling himself an Objectivist - before he was finally summoned into Rand's presence and was thoroughly underwhelmed by her, mid-1950s - while he was a budding Joyce scholar. He probably had no idea at the time what Rand thought about Joyce, or her ideas of What Constitutes Real Art in general. That's my guess.)
6. inscrutable "postmodernist" poetry, like John Ashberry (gosh, I'm shocked)
7. anything "postmodern" or - seemingly - too cute for Rand: Warhol and Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg (one of my faves)...you get the point: none of this is true Art, according to our delightful Objectivist
8. any "art" that comes with a prefix: "visual" or "video" art IS NOT art; "pop" or "performance" or "installation" or "conceptual" art IS NOT art. These are all terms the decadent, socialist, weak moocher Art Establishment has been trying to pawn off as "real" Art to all you saps. Don't fall for it!
9. finally (yea, I know, you're enjoying this and don't want it to end; sorta like an installment of "Fox and Friends"): anything described by cretinous non-heroic artfolk as "challenging"or "explorational" or "confrontational" or "quirky." See these terms and run, ladies and germs. Get with the Objectivist Program and learn from the amphetamine-addled Aristotelian Ayn herself.

On a lighter note, I had not known that Ayn Rand had had her own cable-access (excuse me: private access) TV show from way back when.

Also: HERE's a link to 10 articles about the brilliant purveyor of "Me" and mean-ness, Ayn Rand.

Reykjavik's Wild Street Art
Check it out HERE.
I have the feeling Ayn would not approve.

More Street Art: Slinkachu's Tiny Worlds in the Street
Check it out HERE.
One strongly surmises Ayn would want to spit.

Shelly Miller's Temporary Sugar Mural, About Sugar: "Cargo"
Appearing as a ceramic, but it's not. It was placed on the side of a building in Montreal, and was made from sugar, something so playful and saccharine Ayn would no doubt want to puke. See it HERE. (Sugar murals, not Ayn Rand's puke.)

Speaking of Street Art: Jon Rafman's Google Street View Images
Found at 9Eyes. I use Google Street View but apparently not often enough! (Ayn is spinning in her grave: just think: images captured...ewwww...photography!) Why do I suspect the tiger in the parking lot is some sorta put-on? Still: pretty cool anyway. And who knows what the story is in the first image?

Yuri Suzuki's London Underground...on Circuit Boards
So cool. Cool enough to enrage Ayn Rand? Yep, the idea that this would be shown to a paying public?
Check it out HERE. And what would she make of nudists having an orgy on a polyimide surface of a semiconductor in an integrated circuit, etched with reactive ions? I do not think she would call this Art.

May K's Protein Strand-Art
How wonderful is this? Vote for her if you like what she's seeing/doing. Getting even smaller, you can get your personal DNA map enlarged and printed out and looking like...something Ayn Rand would not cotton to.

Top 20 from 2011's Nikon Small World Contest
HERE. I find all of these completely wonderful and when I got to the 5th place finisher, the microchip surface, I thought I had my favorite. But then number 20, "Agatized dinosaur bone cells, unpolished," from around 150 million years ago, was my favorite. Oops! It's photography, so for Ayn Rand it's not Art.

Finally: A Nod to the 2012 Election: Marriage Equality Art...
Made from seeds!

I first found out about more than half of the above collections of artwerks via BoingBoing.

I suspect the world I perceive is far far far more open than the more-famous Ayn Rand's was, but then I admit my bias.