Re: Artist Shrugged

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 15:55:58 +0000

Nice thoughtful and provocative piece - but I don't believe we need assume that (some) artists have `gone on strike' in a Randian way just because we fail to see an efflorescence of Randian art. It doesn't make a lot of sense anyway to suppose that they would - to what moral end are they supposed to be withholding their labour? It's more plausible that most artists (writers especially, perhaps) understand the points made in the cited post. Rand's melodramatics are a very unsophisticated artistic method. You get past it, often by the time you're in your late teens or early 20s.

No doubt some Rand enthusiasts will get apoplectic at this and remind me how many hundreds of millions of copies of her work are in print. (And perhaps how few of my own are.) This is not a sound argument. Rand's work is a transitional object - certainly it had a great impact on me in my somewhat innocent and arrested adolescence. But few serious artists seem to find anything enduring in it. That's way there are few Randian art works, not because they've all gone to Galt Heaven.

Damien Broderick