MONOCULTURE: CASE STUDIES
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Ayn Rand, "Ethics In Education", 1966
The lecture Ethics in Education of the same year was based on Rand’s 1965 essay Art and Moral Treason (The Romantic Manifesto). Rand believed that art plays an indispensable role in education and moral development. As an ardent adherent of what she called Romantic art, Ayn Rand strongly criticised modern art for its distortion of reality and abolition of heroic spirit. Romantic art, according to her, represents things not as they are, but as they might and ought to be. In her lectures and writing, Rand sets out to develop her own theory of aesthetics, based on the moral principles of Objectivism. According to Rand, the evaluation of art, or aesthetic judgements, lies beyond the sphere of emotions. She defines art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgements”. According to Rand, the purpose of art is to transform the metaphysical abstraction of knowledge into concrete perceptual awareness. Thus, a work of art should be representational, and its subject intelligible. Art guides one’s consciousness and provides a certain vision of existence. Hence Rand’s favour for the “heroic” art of ancient Greece, and Romanticism, and her strong dislike of “deformed medieval monstrosity” as well as modern art.