The film version of (part of) Atlas Shrugged has come to and mostly gone from America’s cinemas. (Around here, it’s still playing at one multiplex in Bellevue.)

All progressively-minded film critics and political pundits have used this apparently mediocre movie to make big snarky laffs at the expense of the story’s original author, the eminently and deservedly mockable Ayn Rand.

As is usually the case, Roger Ebert expressed this conventional wisdom better than anybody. (Though Paul Constant at the Stranger gave it a good try.)

So why am I writing about it this late in the game?

Because there’s something ironic, and not in a cute/funny way, about art-world people calling Rand and her followers arrogant elitists.

There’s an outfit in Italy called the Manifesto Project. It gathered short essays on graphic design and commercial art (in English) from 24 leading designers around the world.

One of these is by the eminent American magazine, book and poster designer Milton Glaser. During a passage about how “doubt is better than certainty,” Glaser starts discussing why so many designers can’t embrace either doubt or collaboration:

There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you.

Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

I’ve ranted umpteen times in the past about “alt” culture’s silly tendencies toward us-vs.-them nonsense. All the anti-“mainstream” pomposity. The brutal stereotypes against anyone who can be sufficiently categorized (suburbanites, sports fans, meat eaters).

The real purpose of art and culture isn’t to show off how awesome you are. It’s to communicate something to somebody else, to strengthen the bonds that tie all of this mongrel species together.

When we fail at this, are we no better than Atlas Shrugged’s cocktail-downin’ snobs (only with hipper clothes)?