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SKYSCRAPERS, SUPERMODELS, AND STRANGE ATTRACTORS This essay is a chapter in: According to Chris Sciabarra, this remains as one of the most original and provocative essays ever published about the ideas of Ayn Rand, generating published academic debate and vitriolic denunciations by followers of Rand. Below is the opening passage. To read more, download the free PDF. INTRODUCTION Both tall and slender and beheld as beautiful, the skyscraper and the supermodel are two of the most visible symbolic representations of "beauty" in modern industrial culture, both embodying the linear Newtonian aesthetic style of industrialism while simultaneously representing widely divergent symbolic and cultural meanings. For Ayn Rand, the skyscraper represented the aesthetic culmination of the capitalist industrial worldview, symbolizing the triumph of reason, science, egoism, and, not least importantly, beauty. In the skyscraper, form and function come together as beauty not to merely symbolize integrity and truth, but to be truth. The "objective" beauty of the skyscrapers which make up the New York City skyline is the truth of industrial capitalism. For Naomi Wolf, the supermodel represents the aesthetic culmination of the patriarchal capitalist industrial world view, symbolizing the triumph of image, deceit, greed, and, not least importantly, the beauty myth. In the supermodel, form deceives function in a beauty whose glittering allure not merely symbolizes deception and falsehood, but comes to be falsehood. The "subjective" beauty of the fashion and cosmetics industries, guided from the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, is the falsehood of industrial capitalism. According to Rand, art was a "barometer" of culture, wherein the prevailing artistic practices provided insight into the state of the culture. Libertarian philosophy, with which Rand has become associated, has virtually ignored her aesthetic-cultural vision in a self-induced blindness expressed through endless arid visions of homo economicus. Perhaps because of Rand's praise of egoism and capitalist industrialism, feminist scholars may tend to overlook the insights of Rand's cultural aesthetics. The cultural aesthetics presented by Rand in The Fountainhead, while in certain respects a metaphor for industrial culture, are actually suggestive of a humane aesthetic that is in harmony with the new nonlinear worldview of the emerging Information Age, which futurist Alvin Toffler refers to as "The Third Wave." Libertarian philosophy has cast its gaze backward, expressing its vision through ceaseless calls for a return to a glorious industrial past of "free markets" and laissez-faire capitalism, becoming little more than an apology for a fading Industrial Age. While libertarian philosophy has produced hardly any cultural vision for the Third Wave, Naomi Wolf, a leading feminist scholar on cultural aesthetics and author of the best-selling book The Beauty Myth, explicitly calls for women to move beyond patriarchal industrialism and create a "Feminist Third Wave." Wolf presents a polemical cultural critique of the female imagery presented in the mass media, focusing her criticisms on the role of ideal beauty and the supermodel. Wolf passionately exhorts women to turn away from the cultural image of the supermodel, a Platonic ideal designed to enslave women through superficial physical appearances which proscribe normative behavior. By contrast, in The Fountainhead, Rand presented a theme of artistic and spiritual integrity expressed through a plot revolving around Howard Roark, an atheistic architect whose aesthetic vision is expressed through buildings exhibiting revolutionary structure and form. Such structures produce a strange new beauty which explodes the classical and traditional aesthetic forms, themselves premised in timeless Platonism, Newtonian linearity, and the Cartesian division between mind and matter. To read more, download the free PDF. |