This commentary is in response to Fred Seddon’s review of Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. In addition to answering objections raised in the review about such matters as whether “abstract art” and photography should qualify as “fine art,” it aims to show in what respects the book was influenced by Rand’s thought.

Kamhi offers an in-depth response to The Aesthetics Symposium (Spring 2001). In addition to answering many of the contributors' objections to What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, she offers a critique of their own theses—in particular, Barry Vacker's claim that chaos theory is implicit in Rand's aesthetics, Jeff Riggenbach's argument that much of Rand's theory was anticipated by Susanne Langer and Stephen Pepper, and Roger Bissell's suggestion that the concept of a microcosm be applied to Rand's view (...) of the function of art. (shrink)