Esthetics

Rand's attempt to extend her sense of "objective" values into the realm of aesthetics became a give-away to the fallacy upon which her philosophy was built. What she extolled as "objective" artistic taste came down to nothing more than the kinds of music, paintings, literature, sculptures, and architecture, that appealed to her eyes and ears. She apparently even elevated a popular dance step to the realm of objective correctness. That she could delude herself into believing that her subjective preferences equated with objective truth should have been a red flag to her ardent followers ...

During the Q&A a woman asked, in all sincerity, why society couldn't do without money, since so many bad things are associated with it ... I don't know whether my response prompted her to rethink her objections to the market, but I am confident her objection was aesthetic. For her, money and competition are ugly ... Like [her], many decent people dislike markets because they find them unattractive. And they associate markets with other things they find unattractive besides money and competition: (rugged, atomistic) individualism, selfishness ... The objections must be met on an aesthetic level.

[T]oday the average person does not know what is art and what isn't, and believes that the only basis for aesthetic preferences is subjective opinion and personal taste ... Many conventional accounts of aesthetics confuse decoration with art because they center aesthetics on the question of "what is beauty?" Objectivism regards this as a secondary issue, and because one's idea of beauty is inevitably informed and affected by one's sense of values, it is an issue that, like art in general, depends for its explanation on man's dependence on philosophical principles.

What drives you to do what you do?
... The most important reason I promote liberty ... is the sheer beauty of it. Much as I appreciate the smile of a baby, a beautiful sunset, a rainbow, the music of Mozart, the love of my family, the magnificence of top handball players, the brilliance of chess grandmasters, the sheer exquisiteness, gorgeousness of the idea of human freedom and liberty, and of how the free enterprise system is one vast means of human cooperation, means even more to me ... It is a beautiful philosophy, and it attracts my aesthetic sense like nothing else in my life.