An essentially Nazi screed

"The Romantic Manifesto" is a bizarre and essentially Nazi screed penned by Ayn Rand, the goddess of Nietzschean-libertarian crackpotdom. To Ms. Rand, art means: sculptures of Greek gods flexin' their muscle, paintings of beautiful (White?) ladies in evening dress, and films of the Manhattan skyline set to dramatic music. Pictures of humble men in old-fashioned villages need not apply. They should fill us with disgust.

When I read this book, I got the impression that the Randian hero is at bottom a lonely and emotionally crippled man, suffering from constant exhaustion. He needs good art to refuel, and perhaps to forget his suffering?

My second impression was that Rand considered most of humanity to be irredeemably irrational, as if suffering from original sin. The "rational" person is perfect in a cold, calculating kind of way, subordinating every thought and feeling (even love) to the requirements of Objectivist metaphysics. In other words, a cultic drone. Rand seems to have been pathologically fearful of contradiction and vagueness, craving the absolute security of simple truths. A is A! I wonder how much of her descriptions of other people's confused minds is really a projection of her own? And why was she so opposed to Realism in art and literature? Realism puts the finger on...well, reality. Rand wanted to get lost in her romantic phantasies of Supermen.

Of course, "The Romantic Manifesto" isn't supposed to sound like this. But it does. There's a constant tension in the book between Rand's honest appreciation of what she considered to be aesthetically pleasing works of art or literature - an appreciation that is to a large extent emotional - and the rational, robot-like, emotionally crippled character of Rand's ideal heroes.

I don't deny that Rand shoots a few turkeys in this book. Most modern art *is* degenerate, depraved or hardly even art. Rand is also sufficiently clever not to claim that only politically correct art (from her perspective) is good. Quite the contrary, she makes a distinction between aesthetics and politics, admitting that the works of Tolstoy are quite good, although they are "metaphysically evil", or that Victor Hugo was the greatest writer ever, despite his socialistic convictions. Believe it or not, but "The Romantic Manifesto" could be of some interest to those who actually bother about the philosophy of art.

In the end, however, Rand's alternative to entartete Kunst is a weird combination of essentially fascist aesthetics, crime novels and tap dancing.

I'm not sure if that counts as progress.