Aesthetic Realism Foundation

141 Greene Street
New York, NY 10012

Autumn 2024

Eli Siegel identified the deepest desire of every person: it is to like the world on an honest basis. I learned that this desire at its mightiest is the impulsion behind all true art. The desire to care more for the world and have others like it more is (for instance) the principal source of inventions that have done good for humanity. And the hope in us to like the world is the source of the pleasure we feel stepping out into the brisk air of a fall morning. There are many things in the world one cannot and should not like, but Aesthetic Realism shows that to think well of ourselves, it’s urgent that we hope to like people and things as much as possible—with all the facts present.

Aesthetic Realism shows there is a fight in everyone between the desire to like reality, see meaning in it, and the drive to have contempt: to feel the way to take care of ourselves and be important is by looking down on other people and beating them out. Contempt can make us feel puffed up, but it always weakens a person’s mind. It makes us unkind—and also makes for a sense of both agitation and dullness.

Aesthetic Realism is based on this landmark principle, stated by Eli Siegel, which shows what art is, what beauty is—and how these have centrally to do with our lives: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” I’ll be saying much more about that!

Vital Education

The work of the Aesthetic Realism Founda­tion is so vital, so needed by people.

• There are, via video conference, classes in which knowledge is warm, wide, of-life-itself, and thrilling: classes in music, the visual arts, poetry, anthropology, marriage, film, education. Every class is based on that groundbreaking principle I just quoted: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
• There are Aesthetic Realism consultations for individuals, given via video conference, and based on that great principle too. In a consultation, you speak with three consultants about matters in your life, whether everyday or pressing, things you want to understand better—like anger, confidence and the lack of it, indecisiveness, what makes love go well and why it so often doesn’t. In consultations is the deepest comprehension of self. They take place in an atmosphere of culture (with instances from literature, art, and history often used to understand a person), and they’re also a good time! I love my work as a consultant to men. I’ve seen how the principles of Aesthetic Realism meet a man at his center, enabling him to be more sure of himself, more integrated, more interested in other people, more truly lighthearted. It is a privilege that I cherish, to see this happen in a man’s life.
• The Foundation has a wonderful outreach program in the New York tri-state area and beyond, with events for seniors and young people, presentations about architecture, music, and more. Learning from the practical and grand education of Aesthetic Realism, people of diverse ages and backgrounds get new hope and interest in life, and care more for other persons—including those they’d seen as different from themselves.

I’m honored to be on the faculty of this foundation and to study in professional classes for consultants and associates taught by Ellen Reiss, the Chair of Education. With her abiding integrity and wide, vibrant intellect, Ms. Reiss continues the work of Eli Siegel, including through her editorship and commentaries in the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

As I comment further on Aesthetic Realism, I’m going to give you links to five places on the Foundation’s websites. These sites house some of the most important material in the understanding of men and women, what makes for beauty in any art, what it means to see people with justice and what opposes that. The following instances represent hundreds of pages of the Founda­tion’s websites—riches that await humanity, including you.

“Must I Wait All My Life?” by Eli Siegel

Before studying Aesthetic Realism, I despaired increasingly about being able to have big feelings for the world and people. I was conscious that when I went to a concert or a play, though I thought beforehand I’d have a big emotion, I didn’t. Or if I did have something like a big feeling, it was very fleeting—didn’t last.

I had no idea something in me was against having large emotions about anything. I learned from Aesthetic Realism this was fundamental contempt: the feeling that nothing deserved to matter too much; I was above what I saw as the humdrum world and aloof from it and other people. Working on that economy for years, I unknowingly paid a price, one aspect of which was: I couldn’t have a large feeling when I wanted to. I’m very glad to say that because of my education, I’ve never had anything like that sense of emptiness and despair again. My life is rich with feeling that’s grounded and accurate.

Meanwhile, the ache and anguish in a person hoping to have feeling and not having it is given beautiful form in a poem by Eli Siegel that I love, “Must I Wait All My Life; or, The Misery Song,” from his 1957 book, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. Eli Siegel was a great American poet as well as philosopher. Reviewing his second collection of poems, Hail, American Development, Kenneth Rexroth wrote in the New York Times Book Review:

He can be hilariously funny, but he can also be uncannily profound, and if you read him aloud, you immediately discover that he is a master of a prosody…as skilled as it seems simple….I think it’s about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets.

“Must I Wait All My Life” has Eli Siegel’s compassion, as he puts into words what many people feel: “Is my life just to be one grey minute after minute?” He gets inside the desperation of a person—the sprawling desperation—but he does it with the tremendous form of an insistent, energetic beat that is anything but sprawling. All the way through, four-beat lines are like a steady pulse, giving raw feeling a beautiful structure, and it’s thrilling. Here’s the poem—one of about 350 of his poems on the Foundation’s website: “Must I Wait All My Life; or, The Misery Song.”

Acting & the Drama

From as long ago as I can remember, I cared for the performing arts—acting, singing, dancing—and it was there that I felt most alive. I was serious about wanting to be a good actor, and, as a theatre major at Syracuse University, I had four years of training based on the teachings of the great theoretician of acting Konstantin Stanislavsky.

But acting seemed unrelated to the rest of my life. And I sometimes had thoughts that it was a lightweight or “flighty” pursuit—one that I should give up. It was a profound and happy revelation to learn from Aesthetic Realism that—far from being apart from my everyday life—the art of acting put together the very opposites I was longing to put together as a person: passion and control, freedom and exactitude, the comic and the serious, rest and motion.

Then, there are the tremendous opposites, central to acting: self and the world not oneself. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that my desire to act came from the best thing in me: the hope to like the world outside myself, see meaning in what was different from myself. When you act, you take on the emotions, the motives, of someone not you and try to have them become you; you try to find how that person walks and talks; and through all this, you become more yourself. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson he gave to an actor, Mr. Siegel said these wonderful and true words:

Acting shows that you don’t have to be fettered to yourself. You can be other people. It is a way of being somebody else for the purpose of coming back home immediately. You take a trip in order to find out who you are.

Noted critics of the drama before Eli Siegel—William Hazlitt and William Winter, for example—intimated the presence of opposites in good acting. But it is Eli Siegel who showed definitively that the oneness of opposites is at the heart of any performance that is beautiful, be it in a comedy or tragedy, a modern or classical work—and that we are trying to make sense of these same opposites in our lives! He loved the theatre, lecturing extensively on the works of Shakespeare and many other playwrights, explaining as never before the intention of the characters, the beauty of the writing, the particular qualities of a given dramatist’s work.

It is my careful opinion that Eli Siegel was the greatest critic of the drama. He wanted to see what made for beauty in any work of art, and—after centuries of thought on the subject by philosophers and educators—he was successful in that quest. He showed that we can learn from the technique of art about our lives—our hopes and fears, our strengths and weaknesses—and in his warm and logical understanding of humanity, he was the kindest person I’ve heard of or known.

I’m very proud that for years I’ve had the honor to perform with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, as we’ve given presentations of great lectures by Mr. Siegel on the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan, Ibsen, Strindberg, Eugene O’Neill, and more. —And here, with much pleasure, I provide a link to the homepage of the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company website.

Yes—Love Is Understood at Last!

Love and logic…  I thought those two had nothing to do with each other. But I learned from Aesthetic Realism that there is a logic to what makes love successful. And I learned what it is in us that interferes with love. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Eli Siegel explains the purpose of love and the big mistake people make:

Love is a means of liking the world through a person.…When we use a person not to like the world but to make ourselves impor­tant…, we are having contempt both for that person and the world.

I made the mistake Mr. Siegel speaks of. I thought love meant having a woman see me as superior to all other people, be silly about me (though decorously so), and treat me like the prince I was sure I was. If a woman didn’t treat me this way, I thought she was either mean or had no taste. This approach did not go over well with the women I had to do with, and my relationships were often tumultuous and always ended in failure.

I’m tremendously happy to say that through what I’ve learned, I truly love a woman: my wife Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, who is an Aesthetic Realism consultant with the teaching trio There Are Wives. I respect Meryl enormously for her intellectual opinion of the education we study. She has a daily good effect on me through her thoughtfulness and liveliness, her keenness and humor, her beauty and depth. With all I still have to learn, I have real romance in my life, and I thank my lucky stars!

I got the chance to express that feeling as I commented on and sang “Oh! Look at Me Now” in a cabaret performance by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company at the Foundation’s holiday gala. Here’s a video:

With Alan Shapiro (piano), Robert Colavito (drums), and Tony Falanga (bass)

The Magnificent Criticism of Art—& Life

The Terrain Gallery—historic and always avant-garde—is part of the Aesthet­ic Realism Foundation, and occupies the first floor of the Foundation’s SoHo building. In 1955, the Terrain Gallery opened in New York City under the direction of artist Dorothy Koppelman. And for nearly seven decades it has shown, with tremendous diversity, this great fact at the very basis of Aesthetic Realism: a good work of art—of any style, genre, time, place—“is a oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” The Terrain is the gallery that shows, as its website says, “the inextricable relation between the technique of art and people’s lives.”

A remarkable page on the gallery’s website is “Art Criticism.” This page links to nearly 50 papers by diverse writers who show explicitly that Aesthetic Realism is true about works of art—for instance, by Rembrandt or Robert Indiana, Leonardo da Vinci or Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Alexander Calder. There are talks and articles on painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, and more. Each describes, through Aesthetic Realism principles, the central reason for the beauty of the work and what that work is telling us about our very own lives. Terrain Gallery: Art Criticism

The Cause of Racism & How It Can End

One of the ugliest, most hurtful things in this world has been ethnic and racial prejudice. People haven’t known what it comes from—but humanity can now learn from Aesthetic Realism about its cause, and learn too what way of seeing can successfully oppose it.

Aesthetic Realism explains that ethnic prejudice begins with a way of seeing that’s very ordinary and is in everyone—a way of seeing that’s completely opposed to the seeing that’s in art. Prejudice begins with contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” The unspoken feeling behind prejudice is: “The world, which is different from me, is not something I like; it doesn’t treat me right—what’s different from me is an enemy I’ve got to defeat. A way to defeat it is to see it as beneath me, and that includes someone with a different skin tone or ethnicity. I’m important, superior because I can look down on this person—even treat him or her brutally.”

The solution to racism—what can really have it end—is in sentences I love by Ellen Reiss, from the issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled “Racism Can End.” What will truly do away with ethnic prejudice, she writes,

is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful. People need to feel, with feeling both intimately personal and large, that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they are in behalf of the same melody; they complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself.

It is possible for millions of men, women, and children to have an emotion about race that is like an art emotion. And it is necessary. [TRO 1264]

In keeping with that statement—here is the anti-prejudice public service film by Ken Kimmelman The Heart Knows Better—a winner of multiple awards, including a National Emmy:

As I said, these five instances from the Foundation’s websites are indicative of the might, the kindness, the newness, and the importance of Aesthetic Realism.

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation is a national treasure, for the education of America and the world!

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