That's a chapter I haven't gotten to yet (and yes, there's a chapter for Abstract art, one for Pop Art, even one for Installation Art). However, scanning what I have of the introductory section to that chapter, here's what I found:
The stylistic diversity of abstract art is bewildering, the more so since every new style or ism carries its own distinctive theoretical baggage, sometimes reversing the claims of previous practitioners. Yet, different as they are in detail, the various styles share certain fundamental characteristics and mistaken premises. [...] While art historians and critics...have begun to acknowledge the flawed theoretical assumptions underlying abstract painting and sculpture, they have failed to take the next logical step--that is, to question their legitimacy as art.
My guess would be no. I think this has a lot to do with the 'selfish' philosophy underlying Objectivism, or, at least, from what I've scanned, I think it does. See, according to these writers, the abstract schools were into the universal (which I don't necessarily buy, but whatever. I'm just speaking for them for a moment). And Rand's philosophy is all about the individual, she HATES the collective, any form of it, and so for her, she'd see abstraction as some sort of archetypal Jungian thing that we don't have to understand to understand. And that's just not kosher for her.
There's all sorts of section headers about cognition and reason, too, but I so don't want to get into that right now. So, I'm not sure what the answers to your questions are. I think maybe I've briefly glanced off of them, but I haven't ANSWERED them, for which I apologise. Hopefully I'll be able to pose more questions/answers this weekend. I'd like to get through at least another chapter of this text.
The stylistic diversity of abstract art is bewildering, the more so since every new style or ism carries its own distinctive theoretical baggage, sometimes reversing the claims of previous practitioners. Yet, different as they are in detail, the various styles share certain fundamental characteristics and mistaken premises. [...] While art historians and critics...have begun to acknowledge the flawed theoretical assumptions underlying abstract painting and sculpture, they have failed to take the next logical step--that is, to question their legitimacy as art.
My guess would be no. I think this has a lot to do with the 'selfish' philosophy underlying Objectivism, or, at least, from what I've scanned, I think it does. See, according to these writers, the abstract schools were into the universal (which I don't necessarily buy, but whatever. I'm just speaking for them for a moment). And Rand's philosophy is all about the individual, she HATES the collective, any form of it, and so for her, she'd see abstraction as some sort of archetypal Jungian thing that we don't have to understand to understand. And that's just not kosher for her.
There's all sorts of section headers about cognition and reason, too, but I so don't want to get into that right now. So, I'm not sure what the answers to your questions are. I think maybe I've briefly glanced off of them, but I haven't ANSWERED them, for which I apologise. Hopefully I'll be able to pose more questions/answers this weekend. I'd like to get through at least another chapter of this text.
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