epistemological assumptions (which bear heavily on her theory of art), see Robert L.
Campbell, “Ayn Rand and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology,” Journal of Ayn Rand
Studies1 (1999), 107–134 <http://myweb.clemson .edu/~campber/randcogrev.html>.- Wassily Kandinsky, “Whither the ‘New’ Art?” (1911), quoted in Mark
Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, New
York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996, 33; and Concerning the Spiritual in Art,
tr. M.T.H. Sadler, New York: Dover, 1977, 2. - For an analysis of the history of nonobjective painting and sculpture—from the
basic metaphysical and cognitive premises of the pioneers Kandinsky, Malevich, and
Mondrian through the critical literature that lent such work legitimacy—see ch. 8 of
Torres and Kamhi, What Art Is: “The Myth of ‘Abstract Art.’” See also my review enti-
tled “Has the Artworld Been Kidding Itself about Abstract Art?” Aristos, December
2013 http://www.aristos.org/aris-13/abstraction.htm. - A more detailed overview of these developments is offered in ch. 14 of What Art
Is: “Postmodernism in the ‘Visual Arts’”; statements by Henry Flynt and Allan Kaprow
relevant to the non-art character of postmodernist work are cited on pp. 271, 275, and - See also my “Anti-Art Is Not Art” (June 2002 http://www.aristos.org/whatart/
anti-art.htm) and “The Lights Go On and Off” (February 2002 http://www.aristos
.org/whatart/lights.htm). In striking contrast to postmodernist tendencies in the artworld,
the Yoruba people of West Africa are careful to maintain the distinction between mimetic
art and reality, according to art historian Robert Farris Thompson, “Yoruba Artistic
Criticism,” in Warren L. D’Azevedo, ed., The Traditional Artist in African Societies,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, 32. Finally, the idea that art represents real-
ity (and is therefore readily distinguishable from it) was basic to ancient thought on the
subject and is evident throughout Halliwell’s discussion in The Aesthetics of Mimesis; see,
for example, ch. 1: “Representation and Reality: Plato and Mimesis.” - The distinction between natural and conventional significance is clearly articu-
lated by Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of
Renaissance Art” (1939), reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Garden City:
Doubleday, 1955, 26–54. Halliwell points to a similar distinction in ancient thought, and
notes that eighteenth-century thinkers also concerned themselves with such a distinc-
tion, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 130, 158–59, and 169. - On the complex iconography of the Arnolfini wedding portrait, see Erwin
Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols., Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1964, I, 201–03. I previously discussed this work in
“Rescuing Art from Visual Culture Studies,” Arts Education Policy Review 106
(September–October 2004)—an earlier version of which was published online in
Aristos, January 2004 http://www.aristos.org/aris-03/rescuing.htm. - Halliwell (Aesthetics of Mimesis, esp. ch. 1) makes a strong case for regarding
Plato’s mirror analogy as intended to demonstrate that so simplistic and naive a view of
the nature of pictorial mimesis is mistaken. On Plato and Egyptian art, see ibid., 127–28. - Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of
Culture and Cognition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 199. See also Donald,
A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness,New York: Norton, 2001. - Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, New York: Vintage, 1995, 240–41. For
research tending to confirm the mimetic foundation of music, see David A. Schwartz,
Catherine Q. Howe, and Dale Purves, “The Statistical Structure of Human Speech Sounds
Predicts Musical Universals,” Journal of Neuroscience23 (2003), 7160–68. The mimetic
204 Notes to Pages 43–48