Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

“Art & What People Deserve” is about what every person is owed in two enormous fields: love and economics. You’ll learn about the true relation between all art and economic justice. And you’ll see a man writing honestly about the largest question in men’s lives: What does it mean to be kind, including to a person I hope to care for? All this is in the compelling, beautiful new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the 1969 lecture A Thing Has This, by Eli Siegel—one in a series of landmark talks in which he showed the central relation, the likeness-in-difference, between art and science. “Self, the arts, the sciences explain each other,” he showed: “they are the oneness of permanent opposites.” For example, the opposites of fact and feeling are deeply together in both art and science—though science accents the first and art the second.

In the lecture we’ve been serializing, Mr. Siegel explains that science and art are in fundamental agreement about what a thing is. Any thing (which includes any object, person, happening) is all its possibilities, all its relations, “everything it has, not just the part you want to see or do see.” He is discussing a humorous literary essay, “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited,” which, he shows, is about what a thing is and isn’t. Its author, Theodore Morrison, presents the approaches of various imaginary professors to that thing which is Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” In our last issue we met the Freudian critic, and now we meet the Marxist critic. Mr. Siegel is jocular about the big wrongness of both Marxist and Freudian art criticism. Yet he says that even they have to do with some facet of what the artwork is.

Since this part of the lecture involves a critic who thinks no art is relevant unless it deals explicitly with class struggle and economic injustice, I’ll say a little about one of Eli Siegel’s magnificent contributions to the seeing of both people and art.

He showed that all true art on any subject (including a poem about a rose) is for and represents economic justice, fairness to people. Art as such is a critic of the profit system, which is the owning of the world by only certain people, not all; the using of the labor and needs of one’s fellow humans to aggrandize oneself….Read more