From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Feb 23 1999 - 08:55:58 MST
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
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