Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

You will have a great experience reading the latest issue of TRO, “The Drama in Objects.” What value is in things, things near us and far away?—and things include people. Is there a drama in every object?  Do we want to see that drama, that meaning, that value? Do we know how deeply we want to? And what in us works against our deep desire to see value? Understanding that humanity has thirsted for is here, including the understanding of the decisive thing which makes for all art. All this is in “The Drama in Objects,” the urgent, thrilling new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value, a 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel, which we have the happiness of serializing. As he discusses passages from a literary periodical of then, Mr. Siegel is showing, with ease, depth, grace, point, and richness, what criticism is and what true art is—and how we, in our own lives, hope to see.

There is so much in simply the part of the talk that is published here. And this principle of Aesthetic Realism is thrillingly alive in it: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

In the present section there is, for instance, his showing what imagination is, the imagination that makes for art. The matter of imagination, with all its grandeur, has been a source of deep unsureness in people and also shame. That is because, though they may throw the term around, they don’t know what distinguishes the imagination that makes for beauty from the imagination that shows off insincerely, or from the imagination that’s behind a lie, or behind a picture in one’s mind of things and people that’s unjust. Eli Siegel is the critic, and Aesthetic Realism the philosophy, who and which have explained the distinction between true and false imagination, and some of that explanation is here….Read more