I revisited this post a few months ago, after Vaniver’s review of Atlas Shrugged.
I’ve felt for a while that Atlas Shrugged has some really obvious easy-to-articulate problems, but also offers a lot of value in a much-harder-to-articulate way. After chewing on it for a while, I think the value of Atlas Shrugged is that it takes some facts about how incentives and economics and certain worldviews have historically played out, and propagates those facts into an aesthetic. (Specifically, the facts which drove Rand’s aesthetics presumably came from growing up in the early days of Soviet Russia.) It’s mainly the aesthetic that’s valuable.
Generalizing: this post has provided me with a new model of how art can offer value. Better yet, the framing of “propagate facts into aesthetics” suggests a concrete approach to creating or recognizing art with this kind of value. As in the case of Atlas Shrugged, we can look at the aesthetic of some artwork, and ask “what are the facts which fed into this aesthetic?”. This also gives us a way to think about when the aesthetic will or will not be useful/valuable.
Overall, this is one of the gearsiest models I’ve seen for instrumental thinking about art, especially at a personal (as opposed to group/societal) level.
“Reverse engineering the facts out of an aesthetic” is an interesting takeaway. I guess it’s actually not that different from the original “aesthetic doublecrux” idea that generated this post, but applying it unilaterally to a work of art without an artist to argue with is an interesting approach.
I revisited this post a few months ago, after Vaniver’s review of Atlas Shrugged.
I’ve felt for a while that Atlas Shrugged has some really obvious easy-to-articulate problems, but also offers a lot of value in a much-harder-to-articulate way. After chewing on it for a while, I think the value of Atlas Shrugged is that it takes some facts about how incentives and economics and certain worldviews have historically played out, and propagates those facts into an aesthetic. (Specifically, the facts which drove Rand’s aesthetics presumably came from growing up in the early days of Soviet Russia.) It’s mainly the aesthetic that’s valuable.
Generalizing: this post has provided me with a new model of how art can offer value. Better yet, the framing of “propagate facts into aesthetics” suggests a concrete approach to creating or recognizing art with this kind of value. As in the case of Atlas Shrugged, we can look at the aesthetic of some artwork, and ask “what are the facts which fed into this aesthetic?”. This also gives us a way to think about when the aesthetic will or will not be useful/valuable.
Overall, this is one of the gearsiest models I’ve seen for instrumental thinking about art, especially at a personal (as opposed to group/societal) level.
“Reverse engineering the facts out of an aesthetic” is an interesting takeaway. I guess it’s actually not that different from the original “aesthetic doublecrux” idea that generated this post, but applying it unilaterally to a work of art without an artist to argue with is an interesting approach.