Why Is Today’s Art So Ugly?

In ‘The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age’, Ayn Rand explains how art could devolve from this…

Michelangelo’s David. Photo by Mark Neal on Pexels.

…to this:

Modern ‘art’. Photo (cropped) by Vanta Nev on Unsplash.

Rand explains today’s esthetic vacuum by reference to mysticism and the end of the most recent age of reason.

According to her, there have been only three periods when a philosophy of reason dominated the zeitgeist: Ancient Greece, the renaissance, and the 19th century.¹ Rand continues: “It is only in these three periods that the dominant trend in art was not dedicated to the degrading and deforming of man, but to the glorification of man, of his existence, and of this earth.”

Whenever a philosophy of reason was dominant, art showed how man can and ought to be. This is the purpose of art which Aristotle identified.² During all other periods, art was primarily done in service of religion; to depict man as a pathetic, helpless being.

The dominant art form during the 19th century, which was, again, compatible with reason, was romanticism. “The greatest artistic innovation of the 19th century was a new literary form: the novel”, says Rand. “Prior to the 19th century, literature presented man as a helpless being whose life and actions were determined by forces beyond his control; either by fate and the gods (as in the Greek tragedies) or by an innate weakness, a tragic flaw (as in the plays of Shakespeare).”

She continues: “Writers regarded man as metaphysically impotent, incapable of achieving his goals or of directing the course of his life. All of them shared the premise of determinism. On that premise, one could not project what might happen to man; one could only record what did happen […].” Rand concludes that fiction was impossible to pursue for such writers. Man with free will appeared in literature only in the 19th century, “and the novel was his proper literary form.” For the first time, readers could enjoy a plot, which is “the dramatization of man’s free will” and “the physical form of his spiritual sovereignty, of his power to deal with existence.” (By “spiritual sovereignty”, Rand does not mean anything supernatural – after all, she was an atheist. I think she’s instead referring to man’s power of volition.)

In other words, the novel mapped perfectly onto the conception of man as a being of his own, self-chosen purpose. Unlike their mystic predecessors, romantics did not view man as a helpless pawn of forces beyond his understanding. They recognized that the course of his life was the result of his own choices: that his life was his own responsibility. And so they didn’t record events that had happened and the choices man had made – instead, they wrote about events that should happen and the choices man should make. Capitalism, which peaked in the 19th century, was the political and economic system that gave man the freedom to achieve this self-chosen purpose, argues Rand.

The regression of art in our age, on the other hand, is a symptom of the wider regression from reason back to mysticism and collectivism, starting at the end of the romantic period. Romantic artists gradually vanished as others “undertook once more the task of degrading man.” Romanticism was replaced by naturalism, says Rand, which returned to the view of man not as a product of his own choices, not as having the power of volition, but as a “helpless creature determined by forces beyond his control.” Some people, I should add, express this alleged helplessness by blaming others. The ‘I couldn’t help it’ type thinking Rand explores in her novel Atlas Shrugged is a symptom of this kind of mysticism.

With the rise of collectivism, naturalists accepted ‘society’ as their master. According to Rand, they wanted to record man not as he could be and should be but as he is, essentially demoting art to journalism. To naturalists, life is senseless, aimless, and meaningless, and values are impossible. But beauty is a major value, so if an ‘artist’ thinks values are impossible, he thinks beauty is impossible. And, I might add: if he thinks man is pathetic and helpless, then he – being a man himself – must necessarily create pathetic art. So then it’s no surprise his ‘art’ is ugly.

But it didn’t stop there. Rand explains that, to determine what man is like, naturalists wanted to record the common, the representative, the statistical. Since success is rare, they documented failure; since beauty is rare, they documented ugly, and so on. Over time, they concluded that such values as success and beauty are not real at all; that only vices are real. This descent into mediocrity found its abyss in symbolism. Rand explains: “What you read today is not naturalism any longer. It is symbolism. […] it is the symbolism of the jungle. According to this modern view of man, depravity represents man’s real, essential, metaphysical nature, while virtue does not. Virtue is only an accident, an exception, or an illusion. Therefore, a monster is a projection of man’s essence, but a hero is not.”

In mordern sculpture, man is presented, when he is recognizable at all, as a barely differentiated chunk of stone with the limbs of a malformed gorilla.

For the vast majority of history, ugly was the default; it’s the emergence and disappearance of beauty that need explaining.³

Since many people do not enjoy ugly art and do not voluntarily spend money to see it, modern ‘artists’ demand government subsidies to continue their butchery of man. Still, some people consume ugly art. Why?

Rand explains this, too: a rational man with a rational philosophy will find the hero of a romantic novel inspiring. Such a novel offers rational men respite – it shows them a world in which their values have been realized and gives them the courage and energy to continue pursuing it. But to irrational men, a hero is a reminder of their failures, and “the image of a monster serves to reassure them. They feel, in effect: ‘I am not that bad.’” They hope for a “blank moral check”, says Rand. (Today, proponents of plus-size ‘modeling’ look for a blank esthetic check; when they see obese models stomping down the catwalk, they think to themselves: ‘I am not that ugly.’) Remember this distinction between rational and irrational consumers of art when you evaluate someone’s taste, and consider what people accidentally confess in how they judge art and beauty.

Free will vs neuroscience

Ayn Rand’s account of the demotion of art to journalism is reminiscent of the demotion of philosophy, particularly epistemology, to neuroscience. In a way, this second demotion is even worse because scientists are considered learned men with authority, so they are more difficult to question than journalists. Who are we to argue with them? An authority’s errors are harder to correct, sometimes even entrenched in law. Like naturalism, the natural sciences have no purview into how man ought to be, nor can they provide a metaphysics by which to judge man’s proper role in the universe. That is the purview of philosophy.

It’s become fashionable for scientists and scientifically minded people to deny free will. Consider Sam Harris: a neuroscientist, philosopher, and outspoken atheist, he has long defended reason against mysticism – or so it seems. Here’s his stance on free will:

Taking the red pill on free will […] you see [that] everyone is an open system. No one authored themselves. No one created themselves. No one […] can directly regulate the effect of every influence that they had or didn’t have. You are the totality of what brought you here. […] The universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time, and the only thing you’ve got is your brain and its states, and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment. And so, the next words that come out of your moth are part of that process.
Now, some people find this to be a, frankly, demoralizing picture. They think, ‘okay well, you’re telling me I’m just a robot.’ But you’re a robot that is open, continuously open, to influence.

Sound familiar? Whether he knows it or not, and although he sells it as revelatory and groundbreaking (“red pill”), Harris continues the age-old mystical tradition of degrading man. He’s just updated it with modern references to robotics, genetics, and neuroscience. By denying free will, and with it, the self, Harris and others like him advocate that tired view of man as a helpless, pathetic creature whose life is determined not by his own values and choices but by powers beyond his control – in this case, “the universe” (ie, the determinism of the laws of physics), his genes (ie, genetic determinism), the environment, or his neurocircuitry, say. Harris implies that, if you don’t have complete control, you have none – and who could possibly control the entire universe? Further, if your neurocircuitry is your innate weakness, your original sin, and it determines your choices before you realize it, as some have argued, then how could you possibly direct your own life?

Harris’s view may sound scientific, but the purpose of science is not to debase man. It’s to help man understand and control the world. And in reality, physical determinism and free will don’t conflict in the first place. As I’ve written before, “they describe different phenomena on different levels of emergence.” And more: “[N]ot only do they not conflict, physical determinism is required for free will to exist. It is because computers [such as the brain] obey physical determinism that they are able to run programs in the first place, including creative programs, ie programs with free will.” (Yes, the brain is a computer.)

If man had no free will, then he would merely be an animal – nothing more. Scientists have long defamed man as being just another animal. This view seems true only through a parochial, biological lens: yes, humans are mammals. But, like the neuroscientific reduction of epistemology to the study of the brain’s hardware (in blatant and unscientific violation of the substrate independence of computation), to hold exclusively the biological view of man as an animal is an epistemological error. As Rand argues in ‘The Objectivist Ethics’, animals survive “by the guidance of mere percepts.”⁴ Man, on the other hand, survives by forming concepts. “He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought.”

Without free will, there could be no concept formation, no values, no responsibility, no beauty, no human life. There could be no justice, either – which is why Harris argues that retributive justice against animals makes no sense. That is true for animals, but he implies that it makes no sense against humans either; and his denial of justice leads him to advocate a lenient treatment of criminals by blaming their crimes on factors beyond their control: “Everything, on some level, is more of a force of nature than it is something that you need to take personally.” Thank god (pun intended) Harris is not a policymaker.

Denying free will by reference to science – neuroscience or what have you – is just another way to escape the responsibility of volition. And if that attempted escape leads somewhere bad, which it eventually does, the denier gets to blame scientists (or physics or “the universe” or whatever hand-wavy excuse he may come up with). Sam Harris’s denial of free will is a textbook example of how mysticism can ruin the thought processes of otherwise careful thinkers. Placing his claims in an historical context shows that he just continues the age-old practice of degrading man.