Suggested Readings: The Fine Arts

What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand
By Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi
ISBN: 0-8126-9372-8

"Torres and Kamhi effectively situate Rand's long-neglected esthetic theory in the wider history of idea. They not only illuminate her significant contribution to an understanding of the nature of art, they also apply her ideas to a trenchant critique of the twentieth century's 'advanced art.' Their exposure of the invalidity of abstract art is itself worth the price of admission."
— Chris Matthew Sciabarra, author of Ayn Rand: Russian Radical

From the Fountainhead to the Future, and Other Essays on Art and Excellence
By Alexandra York
ISBN: 0-9676444-0-2

Alexandra York is a gifted thinker. . . . When one closes her creative enterprise, one certainly has been engaged and enlightened. Her style is one of relaxed seriousness, but her passion for her subject matter is of hurricane proportions. What a resource of the new millennium, which should be on every government leader's desk.
—O. Alden James Jr., president, the National Art Club

Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
By Charles Murray
ISBN: 0-06-019247-X

This is a remarkable tour de force: a rigorously analytic, quantitative study of what is generally thoought to defy such a mode of analysis—the heights of creativity, the manifestations of pure genius. . . . [Charles Murray] has confronted us with such weighty and provocative questions as: Why has creativity been so disproportionately present in the West and not the East?
—Gertrude Himmelfarb, author of One Nation, Two Cultures

Music in Western Civilization
By Paul Henry Lang
ISBN: 0-393-04074-7

"[Lang] retained a profound affection for the cultural achievements of Western civilization. . . . Music in Western Civilization was Lang's elegy to a way of life that was being perverted and dismembered before his eyes, so the book can be read as an act of either mourning or consolation. . . . There is throughout the text a perfectly understandable tone of nostalgia, despair, and irony. It is as if Lang believed he was writing a memoir of a glorious tradition facing a moment of grave discontinuity."
—Leon Botstein, president, Bard College