“Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?”
“Not many,” she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.
“That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment–I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment of my music was of the same source of mine: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a MIND able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it–I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired.” He chuckled.
“There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek–I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, instinctively–or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form. I have too much to show. I only care to be admired by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?”
“Yes,” she said incredulously, “I do.”
“Miss Taggart, do you see why I’d give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why, I have much more in common with them: the capacity to SEE, to connect and to MAKE what had not been seen or made before. That shining vision which they talk about is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor. That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets and artists–what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages?”
“Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth DOES turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it IS and DOES–and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage, and love for truth–as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he’s an artist who hasn’t the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he’s not restrained by such crude concepts as “being” or “meaning,” he’s the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn’t know HOW he created his work or WHY, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn’t stoop to thinking, he just FELT it, all he has to do is feel–he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed waster! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one’s power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art–I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest–I’ll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking “vehicle of higher mysteries.” For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn’t know that he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit–it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy!”
It was true–she thought, when she walked through the streets of Galt’s Gulch Valley, looking with a child’s excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun–that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art–and that the art–she thought, had the stern discipline of business. It was the forgotten delight of being held in rapt attention by the unexpected, the logical, the purposeful, the new–and of seeing a painting with superb artistry…”
–”Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand
I thought this selection from Atlas Shrugged was very interesting–not to say I see myself from any particular view, but the thoughts the author generates about art being about more than feeling are refreshing (if a bit arrogant). It is true that sometimes you just feel a piece of art and it flows out of you, but usually that feeling of uninhibited, glorious creation comes from a great deal of planning and foresight. I think it takes equal parts passion and planning to make a piece great. If you are ignorant in how to express what is inside of you, the result will not be worth the emotion. One beautiful example of a blending of these two ingredients is Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, pictured below.
I love how Whistler did not quite finish the piece, letting it be as a glimpse of a moment. It’s not overworked. Yet the feeling of the explosion is there, the surprising violent beauty of the shower of sparks in the dark, reflected on the water. We see and feel what he wants us to in the piece because he took care in execution.
Also, the part about the customer relating to the artist is so true. There is this great connection when people can appreciate something on the same level for the same reasons.
Road to Tomorrow, lithograph, 2008
Pose Studies, pen and ink, 2009
