Beyond Taste.

• Author: Oliver, Charles
• Position: Review

The perils of defining art

What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, Chicago: Open Court, 523 pages, $21.95

OK, so she said that Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming were the great Romantic writers of her day, the rightful heirs to Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. She dismissed Shakespeare--William Shakespeare--because he didn't believe in free will. And Ludwig von Beethoven's music was lousy, she proclaimed, because it was shot through with a malevolent sense of life.

But are these facts sufficient reason to dismiss Ayn Rand's ideas on art? By their silence, most critics have answered an emphatic (and understandable) yes. Now, nearly two decades after her death, critics who aren't necessarily worshipful acolytes are beginning to address, and sometimes trying to correct or expand, Rand's thinking. Rand's aesthetics, presented most fully in her essay collection The Romantic Manifesto (1969), are explained and critiqued in What Art Is by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi. Torres and Kamhi are editors of the journal Aristos, which skews decidedly to the culturally conservative end of the arts spectrum. (Historian Jacques Barzun and novelist Mark Helprin are among its contributors.)

Torres and Kamhi treat Rand's aesthetics with respect, though not with slavish devotion. They don't hesitate to correct her when they think she is wrong, or where she substitutes simple personal preference for ostensibly rational theory. One great irony suffuses What Art Is: Though Rand as a political philosopher advocated mostly untrammeled liberty, Torres and Kamhi's book hints that defending her "objective" standard of art may provide support for censorship.

Before explaining their own views on art, Torres and Kamhi address the most typical extant definition of art. Art, say many, is that which artists produce--a perfectly circular definition. What is an artist? Someone who produces art. So what is art? You get the picture. A similar problem faces a related set of questions: Art is what hangs in museums or galleries. What are galleries or museums? Places that display art. Following Rand, Torres and Kamhi seek to avoid such tautologies and fashion a proper definition of art by asking what purpose it serves.

"Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level o f his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts," wrote Rand. While man is a conceptual thinker, she argued, it brings us special pleasure and insight to turn concepts into more readily grasped percepts. In this reading, art is (or should be) a selective recreation of reality according...