 So, let me start by encouraging you to read this amazing book. You know, I've read it, I don't know, four or five times in my life and I read it again in preparation for this conference and getting blown away is an understatement, particularly this time that I read it. The more I know about art, the more I've experienced art and those of you who know me know that I seek art out and I spend a lot of time with art, the more I know about it, the more impressed I am with the depth of what she is conveying in the romantic manifesto, how original it is, how new it is, and how insightful it is. And it's not just, in a sense, it's not just that it's about the art out there to write your response to the art, it's amazingly psychological. And Rand generally, if you read Rand, her essays are almost always psychological, there's always a psychological aspect, even when she's talking about deep philosophy. But here, it's because it's about your response to art, it's amazingly psychological and I think we can all learn from reading their essay, not just about art, but about ourselves, about our own psychology. And but I want to say something about her genius, because Rand is a unique genius. She's a philosopher and we're all familiar with her as a philosopher. She's a great artist and we're all familiar with her as a great artist. And what you see in the romantic manifesto is those, I mean, you see it in a literature, obviously, but here in the romantic manifesto, what you see is both of those coming together, her deep understanding of the creative process, a personal understanding of the creative process, a kind of understanding of the creative process that it's hard for me when I'm reading it to get because I've never created art. So it's something that only the creators, I think, fully understand. So combine that with a vast knowledge of the history of art and a woman who went out and sought art and experienced art and engaged with art, all kinds of art over her lifetime. So the experiential, the creation and overlay that with a genius as a philosopher. And that's what you get in the romantic manifesto. It's the combination of all of that. And it makes it so that, again, the more I read the book, the less I understand it in some sense, the more I get how much I don't know, the more I get how deep she is and how in a sense it's hard to understand without the inductive knowledge that she had about art and about that experience of creating art. So my intention here is not to intimidate you into not reading it, read it because every reading you'll get something out of it. But it's truly a profound book. In many respects, it's the one that I find the hardest to fully grasp, to fully concretize for myself. Yeah, I have exactly that same experience. And it's important, I think, really to emphasize that I'm certainly from my perspective, you're from Iran's too, as he just said, that I approach the book from I'm a consumer of art, not a producer of art. And if you think of the genesis of the book, I mean, the subtitle is It's a Philosophy of Literature, and the book comes out of lectures that she gave on the art of fiction that's now collected into a book that Tor Buckman edited. But that is aimed, I think that those set of lectures were aimed primarily, not exclusively, but primarily at aspiring fiction writers. So they're from the point of view of the producer of art. And I think there's a lot of remnants of that in the romantic manifesto, that it's distinctively has a perspective that this is what it is like from the point of view of the creator of art. And that that is a layer of complexity that often goes over my head. And I want to now make a comment about some of the themes that she brings up in the introduction to the work that helped place this whole issue of romanticism and aesthetics into the context of what I think she was doing as a philosopher and what she was particularly interested in. Ayn Rand was a champion of the 19th century. I mean, she called the 19th century the greatest century in Western history and the greatest century existentially. So it's the century in which you have just tremendous advancements, tremendous advancements in standard of living, of rising populations, of the creation of the middle class. You get tremendous developments in science, in technology, and in art. So she thinks in terms of the culture, the 19th century is the greatest century in Western history. It's the greatest existentially, but not intellectually. She says it's one of the worst intellectually or philosophically. And part of what is happening in the philosophical world is they're turning against all these great values that the 19th century is helping bring into existence. And you can boil those three sort of to get the underpinning of what the cultural trend of the 19th century is, and this is the way she puts it in the introduction, of individualism, capitalism, and romanticism. These are the three fundamental values that the 19th century brings into existence and gives expression to. And individualism here means individualism in ethics. So you can think of it in terms of the declaration, the pursuit of your own happiness. That morally is what is ascendant in terms of culture, not again in terms of the philosophy of the 19th century. But the culture, it's takes seriously in the ethical realm that the individual is the primary unit. And then the consequence of that, if the declaration is taken seriously, the consequence socially, economically, is capitalism. And this perspective on the individual and the individual taking himself seriously, concerned with his self-expression, self-development, what the movement you get in art is romanticism. Romanticism, one of the things she highlights about it is, it's about the individual self-expression. And so in a way you can think of it, there's an individualism that's underlying all the capitalism is the system of individualism. Romanticism is the art of the individual and that glorifies the individual. And individualism in morality is about taking seriously your own life and happiness. And these are the values that she is interested in, that she champions, and that in the 20th century she has to defend and put on a secure philosophical foundation because her view is, all three have crumbled or disintegrated. That individualism has been replaced by all forms of collectivism in morality. That capitalism is being replaced with socialism in America with a mixed economy. And that romanticism has disintegrated. And they all for a similar reason that they did not have a philosophical, there was no philosophical understanding of the essence of any of individualism and morality of capitalism or romanticism. And she's gonna write that this is what they are, and this is how to understand and defend them. And if you think of her major philosophical work, virtue of selfishness. It's a new concept of egoism, it's subtitle. This is about understanding at the deepest roots, individualism in morality, in the pursuit of happiness. And then capitalism on the unknown ideal is about defending capitalism. And the romantic manifesto is about defending romanticism. And that's a way of understanding her work. And then ITOE, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, is a defensive reason that she thinks underlies all of these. And that's in essence, I think what she's interested in from a philosophical sort of a non-fiction writing perspective. You don't think art should necessarily reflect life, especially life as it is today? Exactly, and I recognize other schools of art, only I don't like them. The school, I prefer romanticism. I just found that a little bit contradictory with, then, when she said, in terms of religion, that she didn't believe in religion as we do, because it's not based on realism, as she said, and more mysticism. You're mixing categories. You see, the issue of religion is metaphysical. It's so in nature, in reality. Now, art is not metaphysics. It's not there without men. Art is man-made. It's a product of men. And when it's a product of men, you don't have to copy it. You don't have to say, this is a fact, because ten men did it that way. You create your own art, or you like a school of which there's only one representative. Anything that is man-made is open to reason, but not by the same kind of mental process as metaphysical or scientific factual issues. For instance, here, I can only recommend that you read my book, The Romantic Manifesto, because I couldn't cover it in a few minutes. The reasons why I can demonstrate to you that romanticism is the best school of art, the best, most justifiable, but not the only one. You like Charlie's Angels. Yes. Because why? Because it's the only romantic television show today. It's not realistic. It's not about the gutter. It's not about the half-wit, retarded children, and all the other kind of shows today. It's about three attractive girls doing impossible things. And because they're impossible, that's what makes it interesting. It shows three young girls who are better than so-called real life. And that's a romantic school of literature. You want art to be romantic, don't you? Oh, certainly. You're not crazy, then, about art which reflects life. Not the life of the moment. I want art that reflects life long-range. How do you feel about abstract art? Do you mean non-objective? Non-objective. I think it's less art than photography. I think it is an enormous fraud. Fraud? Yes. I think it's impossible to discuss it seriously. It means nothing, it is nothing. The perpetrators claim that they don't know what they're doing. And I think they're right. I'm willing to take them at their word. They don't know what they're doing, and neither do we, and the Ashken is the proper place for it. But I mean it seriously.