Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

As a new year begins, we’re proud to present the next issue of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical, with its fresh, magnificent understanding of the meaning of art for our lives. The title is: “Art and the World Itself.” In January 2026, TRO asks and answers the questions What does art have to do with your own life right now, your worries, confusions, angers, hopes? What does art say about the confusing world we’re in? The way these questions are answered is thrilling to read; and the instances of art that are referred to and commented on are surprising, sometimes funny, and they span centuries. So here, with its kind and immensely needed logic, is the current number of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are publishing in three parts a lecture that is important for people of any time and enormously important now. Eli Siegel gave this talk, titled Poetry Is Concerned, in December 1965, and we’re honored to bring you the first part here. Mr. Siegel’s spoken prose is, as always, beautiful: leisurely and vivid; imbued with scholarship; simultaneously passionate, graceful, and exact. The lecture, while dealing with various instances of literature, is deeply about What is art, and what does it have to do with our lives and the world now? What is art for?

These days, as in other times, one hears various advocates for the arts saying such things as: Get some relief—put aside for a while the distressing things happening around you; go to a museum, where you’ll find a better world! Or: Get away from the things you’ve been thinking about—just listen to some music; get lost in a classic novel, or in the “magic” of dance. There’s been a feeling that the world of art is separate from the world we’re in, and that we need art as an offset to the mess that is current life.

Aesthetic Realism says No! It says art is neither an escape nor an offset. Art is necessary to see what the world truly is—and what we truly are. “In reality opposites are one,” Aesthetic Realism explains; “art shows this.” The grandeur of art exists because art is just to the world and embodies what reality truly is; to see art as an escape from life is an insult to art, life, and ourselves….Read more