TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Spotlight on Art

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 11:53 am ET

As Ayn Rand writes in The Romantic Manifesto:

Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows that he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life. . . . That power is given to him by art.

That is why The Objective Standard discusses art and promotes good art.

In recent issues Craig Biddle has interviewed the painters Linda Mann and Bryan Larsen. I was struck by Larsen’s discussion of how he selects some of his subjects:

I’m . . . really drawn to the concept of aspiring to do what your heroes have done and take it another step beyond. So I’ve done a lot of paintings with children aspiring to do great things. They seem to have the purest form of hero worship. For them, there are no limits; and if something has been done, there’s no reason why you can’t do something twenty times more difficult.

For more about painting, literature, and films, see TOS’s catalog of articles about the arts from the print journal and the blog.

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Image: Bryan Larsen

Posted in: The Arts