Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 19/06/2001
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday June 19, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
A doyen of Auckland's art establishment - a pretentious poseur whose jowls wobble - hangs used car tyres from his ceiling. He regards hanging a tyre from his ceiling as "art" - an act higher than & unsullied by mind or matter - while the act of conceiving & producing the tyre in the first place he regards as ignoble, low, "materialistic." He once trembled to me that it was "preposterous" to offer the inventors & manufacturers of microwave ovens the same salute one would offer composers or painters. Leaving aside that HIS kind of "art" is deserving of nothing but contempt, I want to make the point today that the creator of material values is of the same exalted status as the creator or recreator of spiritual values, & for the same reasons. Or rather, I want to let Ayn Rand make the point. Some of you will find this idea shocking, so get a grip on your jowls:
"Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating & comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes - which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification - which means: the capacity to see, to connect & to make what had not been seen, connected & made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies & novels - what do they think 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 supposed to burn within musicians & poets - 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 ... This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage & 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 would not stoop to thinking; all he has to do is FEEL - he FEELS, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard!"
Now THERE'S a line to hurl at the next poseur you come across at a modern art exhibition! Be aware, though, that's this is not a diatribe against feelings as such - the words are spoken by Richard Halley, who is a COMPOSER in Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. It IS a diatribe against the idea that ANY old feeling should be mindlessly indulged, & the result then glorified BECAUSE it is mindless.
Halley's concluding words are:
"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."
As the old, dichotomy-free saying would have it: food for thought!
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