Earlier this year I published Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, a collection of essays on how to look closely at sculpture. One of my upcoming projects is a companion volume, Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love. It will include essays from the past twenty-five years or so, most of them previously unpublished. As I work on it, I’ll be writing occasional posts about issues that arise. This is a continuation of last week’s post on the audience for the book.

Forgotten Delights: The Producers

Around 2002, I switched from writing about painting to writing about sculpture – mostly because I couldn’t see how to get a book on paintings into print with adequate color illustrations. See the first post in this series on that.

My first book on sculpture dealt with nineteen outdoor sculptures in Manhattan. I chose those particular sculptures – producers, explorers, inventors, and so on – because I thought they would appeal to Objectivists. But I hoped that a book on New York City sculpture would also appeal to a wider audience. Of course, writing for the wider audience meant I couldn’t assume a knowledge of Ayn Rand’s esthetics in Forgotten Delights: The Producers.

To hook readers, I described in the introduction how these sculptures give me emotional fuel. In the main text, I looked at the sculptures largely in terms of selectivity: what details the artist included in a sculpture and what effect they have on our interpretation of it. I didn’t quote Ayn Rand’s definition of art at all. In fact, the only time I quoted her was in the introduction, regarding the value of productive work.

Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan

In 2005, I was hurled out of my comfort zone. To be more precise, I hit the eject button. I signed a contract with New York University Press to write a book for the general public about several dozen outdoor sculptures in Manhattan. (More on how that contract came about in Carving Out an Unlikely Writing Niche.) Obviously, assuming knowledge of Ayn Rand’s works would not be appropriate in a work published by an academic press for a general audience. Yet Ayn Rand’s esthetics was the basis of my own writings, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to mention her writings in the book.

After much trial and error, I ended up paraphrasing many of Ayn Rand’s terms in the early chapters of the book, then stating Rand’s definition of art midway through the book. For example, in Chapter 1, I introduced the idea that art is selective. In Chapter 8, I brought up the idea that artworks show values. After repeating these points in a number of essays, I quoted Rand’s definition of art in Chapter 30 – at which point readers were already familiar with all the terms in the definition.

Paraphrasing Ayn Rand forced me to “chew” her ideas rather than just quoting them. I did worry briefly that this would make the book boring for Objectivists … but Objectivists tend to focus on metaphysics, epistemology, and politics rather than esthetics, so my guess was that thinking about esthetics would be new territory for many of them.

It took a lot of effort to make the 54 separate essays coalesce into a book, but I was satisfied when I finally submitted the manuscript of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide to New York University Press. A few months later, the editor emailed that he wasn’t comfortable with “all Ayn Rand, all the time.” I told him that removing all references to Rand would require a substantial rewrite of the book. He sent the manuscript to an outside reviewer, who raised no objection to the mentions of Ayn Rand. The editor backed off. To the best of my knowledge, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan remains the only work based on Ayn Rand’s esthetics to be published by New York University Press – perhaps by any academic press.

Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan was reviewed in the New York Times, which hammered home to me the point that my potential audience is much, much larger if I don’t aim strictly at Objectivists. I have come to enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to paraphrase Rand in a way that gets the basics across, but also leads up to Rand’s own very precise formulations.

“How to Analyze and Appreciate Paintings” in The Objective Standard, 2007

My first published piece on analyzing paintings appeared in The Objective Standard. Although it has “objective” in its title, TOS aims at to reach non-Objectivists as well. Again it made sense not to use Rand’s terminology without setting a context for it.

There was another complication for this article. It appeared a year after my article on analyzing sculpture, “Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love.” The introduction to that article discussed the importance of favorite artworks in our lives, and how we could extend our enjoyment by looking at them in detail and determining their themes. I didn’t want to repeat the same introduction. So in “How to Analyze and Appreciate Paintings,” I used selectivity as a hook (“Why size and everything else matters”), then segued into how to look at details and determine the theme of a painting.

Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, 2020

The introduction to my recent compilation of essays, Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, is an edited version of the TOS article on sculpture. But while I was working on the compilation, I decided the introduction could be improved: the points could be geared even more toward a general audience. The structure of the book’s introduction is:

1. Why would you want to learn to look closely at art you love?
2. What does my method of looking at art involve?
3. Why did I write this book, rather than simply revamping the essay from The Objective Standard and letting people browse the essays on sculpture on DianneDuranteWriter.com?
4. Summary of questions for looking at sculpture

The audience for Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love is the same as for Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love: a combination of Objectivists and a general audience. I’ll be editing the twenty-plus essays with that in mind. When I finally edit the introduction (which I don’t usually tackle until I’ve finished the main text), it’s possible that I’ll just repeat the same points as I used in the introduction to Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love.

Then again … there’s always something new to learn when you do a deep dive. I might end up revising the introduction to the painting book, and then revising the sculpture book as well.

More

• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon print and Kindle formats.
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