Since her death, Ayn Rand has gained more respectful attention from the scholarly community than she ever received in life. The first published discussions of Objectivism were harshly critical, and often showed that the critics had read Rand superficially, not attempting to follow, and perhaps not even noticing, the details of her arguments. Recent years have seen both careful assessments of her philosophy and attempts to restate and develop it.

What Art Is is such an attempt, the first to examine Rand's aesthetics.

Regrettably, some of these works reflect only the worst aspects of Ayn Rand's thought. The conclusions of What Art Is are as relentlessly simplified as Rand at her most doctrinaire; the arguments develop no new insights from Rand's theories. The primary point seems to be that, by Ayn Rand's definition of art, virtually none of the painting, sculpture, music, or literature of the 20th century is art at all. Torres and Kamhi seem to believe 20th century art was not even a mistaken attempt at art, but a deliberate fraud.

The comments that suggest this view don't recognize the intellectual content of artists' statements; for example, they quote Samuel Beckett's "nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, [and] no desire to express" without noticing that he is paraphrasing Buddhist teachings.

Their discussions of abstract art and serialist music never address the theoretical basis for these movements; much of the time they seem to view painters' and composers' theoretical statements simply as attempts to cover up the emptiness of their work, in the manner of The Emperor's New Clothes. I don't believe that this is true. The 20th century has been dominated by the effort to produce art free of human biases—such "biases" as diatonic harmony, or pictures as windows into virtual space, or verse with scansion and recurrent form. This effort has mostly been counterproductive, but many artists have taken their theories seriously and worked to create art in accord with them.

In addition, Torres and Kamhi share Rand's vice of turning her own tastes in art into philosophical universals. Particularly egregious is their discussion of rock and roll (p. 219), whose vices they catalog as "its predilection for mind-numbing loudness, its dependence on electronic instruments and synthesized sound, its simplistic approach to composition, and its penchant for repetitive patterns broken by abrupt shifts and endings" Rock and roll doesn't have the grand architectural structure of classical music, any more than a Shakespearean sonnet has the elaborate plot of Atlas Shrugged; but many of its songwriters have had a fine sense of melody and some of its performers have been brilliantly moving. (Prometheus Hall of Fame judges looking for potential award recipients could do worse than to listen to "Who's Next" or Rush's "2112.")

Elsewhere in the cultural spectrum, their dismissal of James Joyce's fiction seems overhasty; the same online literary poll in which Ayn Rand took first place also showed Joyce's novels, even Finnegans Wake, taking higher rank than in the vote by literary critics, which does not seem to indicate the inaccessibility to readers that they claim. Joyce is a master of characterization, able to persuasively show the inner thoughts of a brilliant mind (I am thinking particularly of the third chapter of Ulysses); he is, along with Ayn Rand and J. R .R. Tolkien, one of the 20th century's great Thomistic literary theorists; and his work is pervaded not merely with anarchism but with individualist anarchism—though only Robert Anton Wilson seems to have been influenced by him among libertarian writers.

These eccentricities, so like Rand's, would be more pardonable if Torres and Kamhi clarified or advanced Rand's thought. But they leave its muddles unresolved. Their treatment of film is a case in point. They share Rand's conviction that film is essentially literary and deny that a film can tell a story through pictures, whereas, they say, one can follow a film's story by listening to the sound track alone. Many years ago, after audiotaping many Star Trek episodes, a friend of mine tried taping an episode of The Avengers; it was impossible to tell what was happening, so much was shown visually—whereas the original Star Trek would have worked well as a radio drama. So I think it is only in films that fail to make effective use of the medium that Rand's thesis is correct. Rand's own favorite philosopher, Aristotle, named spectacle, an essentially visual element, as a vital attribute of drama. Torres and Kamhi cite Rand's quotation of Fritz Lang's slogan "nothing in this film is accidental" and emphasize Lang's use of visual art, not discussing how this can be integrated with their literary view of film. In saying that photography cannot be art because the camera does not create but only records, they contradict their own view of Fritz Lang as a visual artist who used a camera; perhaps they rely on Lang's role in composing the scenes that he filmed, but still photographers also do this—or do they imagine that Robert Mapplethorpe, whom they mention unfavorably several times, just happened to be standing around with a bullwhip thrust into his anus when his camera went off? (Incidentally, while Rand would have thought Mapplethorpe's content revoltingly evil, his technique has the visual clarity for which she praises Dali's painting, whose content she found repulsive.) Rand offered an unclear view of film as an art that reflected her experience in the industry as a scriptwriter, Torres and Kamhi, to paraphrase Blake, have not stated one new truth and have repeated all of Rand's confusions.

There is certainly room for a better approach to art, basing art on the natural operations of the human mind. There is a need for a clearer philosophy of art to guide it. There are valuable insights in Rand's writings that might help develop such a philosophy. But this is not the book to do the job.