What is Art?

Intro

• “If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence—a reward—it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of causes and effects.” — from Anna Karenina

  • If it has a cause, something better caused it. If it has a reward, the reward is better than it. The truly good, the best, is beyond cause and effect.
• “Light makes contemplation possible; it is that which can be revealed and at the same time that which reveals.”
• “If beauty is revealability, and revealability is light, then, I repeat, beauty is light and light is beauty. The absolute light is then the absolutely beautiful—Love itself in its completeness, which (through itself) makes every person spiritually beautiful.” — Florensky
• According to Baumgarten, the founder of aesthetics, truth is the object of logical knowledge, perceived by reason; beauty is the object of aesthetic/sensual knowledge, perceived by the senses; and the good is the perfect attained by moral will.
• Baumgarten believed that the highest manifestation of beauty is perceived in nature, and therefore the imitation of nature is the highest task of art.
• Others believed that art is the carrying of the beautiful to the level of the true and beautiful, its aim being moral perfection.
• “The ugliness or beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the contemplator. And that is why beauty is located, not in the world, but in the beautiful soul.”
• Schelling believed beauty to be the representation of the infinite with the finite, and art to be the uniting of the subjective and objective, if nature and reason, of conscious and unconscious
• Weisse says there lies a contradiction in the idea of truth, in that the singular I perceives the All. The reconciliation of this contradiction is accomplished through beauty.

• Grant Allen described beauty as that which affords the greatest stimulation with the least expenditure.

  • Hmm, yes and no. Effortless evocation is something the beautiful induces… but also, that which we work for, toil towards, can be made more beautiful through the toiling? Maybe? Maybe that isn’t beauty though… but meaning, purpose… meaning and beauty seem to be intertwined though.

• After listing a bunch of attempted definitions of beauty, Tolstoy summarizes them into two views:

  • The objective: “that beauty is something existing in itself, a manifestation of the absolutely perfect — idea, spirit, will, God.”
  • The subjective: “that beauty is a certain pleasure we experience, which does not have personal advantage as aim.”
• Tolstoy claims the objective view is essentially the same as the subjective: “In the objective sense, we call beauty something absolutely perfect which exists outside us. But since we recognize the absolutely perfect which exists outside us and acknowledge it as such only because we receive a certain kind of pleasure from the manifestation of this absolutely perfect, it means that the objective definition is nothing but the subject one differently expressed.”
• Beauty as that which pleases us without awakening lust.
• “An objective definition of art does not exist; the existing definitions, metaphysical as well as practical, come down to one and the same subjective definition, which, strange as it is to say, is the view of art as the manifestation of beauty, and of beauty as that which pleases (without awakening lust).”
• “Whatever follows may be committed in art, once they are accepted among the upper classes of our society, a theory is at once elaborated to explain and legitimize these follies, as if there had ever been epochs in history when certain exceptional circles of people had not accepted and approved of false, ugly, meaningless art, which left no traces and was completely forgotten afterwards.”
• Considering art/beauty is that which pleases us, Tolstoy says, is akin to considering food, and its quality, as that which tastes good. “Just as people who think the aim and purpose of food is pleasure cannot perceive the true meaning of eating [to nourish], so people who think that the aim of art is pleasure cannot know its meaning and purpose.”
• Tolstoy describes art as a means of communion. But rather than communion/conveyance of thoughts, which is accomplished through words, art conveys feelings through symbols.
• “Art is that human activity which consists in man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.”
• “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea, beauty, God; not, as the aesthetician-physiologists say, a form of play in which man releases a surplus of stored-up energy;…but is a means of human communion, necessary for life and for the movement towards the good of the individual man and of mankind, uniting them in the same feelings.”
• Without art, this means of cultivating harmony of feelings, we’d be divided and hostile.
• Talks about the men of antiquity (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) seeing art as exclusive to that which evokes special feelings from a sort of religious consciousness, but Tolstoy sees any activity that evokes common feelings as art (lullabies, jokes, home decor, etc).
• Some teachers (Plato, some Christians, Muslims, Buddhists) have even rejected all art, considering it dangerous (for it can infect communities with false/harmful feelings), and thus were banished/untolerated.
• Modernity, on the other hand, tolerates all art, so long as it serves beauty—that is, gives people pleasure.
• “Formerly, there was fear that among objects of art some corrupting objects might be found, and so all art was forbidden. Now, there is only fear lest they be deprived of some pleasure afforded by art, and so all art is patronized. And I think that the second error is much greater than the first and that its consequences are much more harmful.”

• Tolstoy on the good, the beautiful, the true:

  • The good as

    • the eternal,
    • the highest aim of our life.
    • “Our life is nothing else than a striving towards the good—that is, towards God.”
    • Fundamental, and metaphysically constituting the essence of our consciousness and thus undefinable by reason.
    • “That which no one can define, but which defines everything else.”

  • The beautiful as

    • What is pleasing to us
    • Often, or always, in opposition to the good, for the good coincides with a triumph over predilections whereas beauty is the basis of predilection.
      • Don’t quite agree. Can’t pursuit of the good be pleasing? Pleasing for whom and in what manner…

  • The true as

    • “The correspondence between the manifestation or definition of an object and its essence, or the understanding of the object common to all people.”
    • A means of attaining the good.
    • Having nothing in common with beauty, for it exposes deception and destroys illusion, the main conditions of beauty (as Tolstoy defines it)
• To say a work of art is good but incomprehensible is like saying some kind of food is good but people cannot eat it. Tolstoy gives the example of people with perverted taste who eat rotten cheeses like the upper class and their incomprehensible art. Good art, he says, is always understood by everyone, just as bread and fruit and enjoyed by everyone.
• Scolds the upper class art as being centred around three qualities: idleness, vanity, and especially sexual lust.
• Calls the highest works of art those understood by all: bible stories, gospel parables, fairy tales, folk songs
• “…lofty artistic work may indeed be incomprehensible, only not to simple, unperverted working people (they understand all that is lofty) - no, but a true artistic work may be and often is incomprehensible to highly educated, perverted, religion-deprived people, as constantly occurs in our society, where people find the highest religious feelings simply incomprehensible. I know people, for example, who consider themselves most refined, and who say that they do not understand the poetry of love for one’s neighbour and of self-denial, or the poetry of chastity.”
• “Thus, good, great, universal, religious art may be incomprehensible only for a small circle of perverted people, but not otherwise.”
• “come to be replaced by counterfeits of art.
• “Art of the whole people emerges only when a man of the people, having experienced a strong feeling, has need of conveying it to others. Art of the wealthy classes emerges, not because of any need in the artist, but mostly because people of the upper classes demand amusements, which are very well remunerated.“
• “An artistic impression is an infection, it works only when the author has himself experienced some feeling and conveys it in his own way, not when he conveys someone else’s feeling as it was conveyed to him.”
• “As soon as art became a profession, the chief and most precious property of art — its sincerity — became significantly weakened and was partly destroyed.”
• “Two living leaves cannot be completely like each other, but two artificial leaves can be alike. It is the same works of art. They can coincide fully only when neither the one nor the other is art, but only a contrived simulacrum of art.”
• “Listening to this opera, I could not help thinking of a respectable, intelligent, literate village labourer - one of those intelligent, truly religious men whom I know among the people - and imagining the terrible perplexity of such a man if he were to be shown what I had seen that evening.”
• “I know that the majority of people who are not only regarded as intelligent but are indeed intelligent, capable of understanding the most difficult scientific, mathematical and philosophical reasonings, are very rarely capable of understanding a most simple and obvious truth, if it is such as requires that they admit that a judgement they have formed about something, sometimes with great effort, a judgement they are proud of, which they have taught to others, on the basis of which they have arranged their entire life - that this judgement may be wrong.“
• Of the art of the sophisticated class, Tolstoy continues to question whether this is art at all. If art is a means of infecting others with the feelings of the artist, of impressing upon them something substantial, most upper class art—fraught with imitation, cleverness, and diversions—barely infects the upper class, let alone the common man. The impression they make doesn’t endure, and without that enduring communion of feelings, of impressions upon others, it ceases to be art.
• Speaks of the songs of peasant women impressing him more than a Beethoven rendition, and an anonymously authored folk tale entrancing him while acclaimed novels bore him to death. On the novelists, he writes: “from the first lines you see the intention behind the writing, and all the details become superfluous—you feel bored. Above all, you know that the author never had any other feeling than the desire to write a story or a novel.” Oof.
• In these disembodied, abstract, upper rungs of sophisticated life, “these people not only cannot distinguish true art from its counterfeits, but always mistake the worst and most false for genuine art, without noticing the genuine, because counterfeits are always more flashy, while true art is modest.”
• “The chief peculiarity of this feeling [of artistic infection] is that the perceiver merges with the artist to such a degree that it seems to him that the perceived object has been made, not by someone else, but by himself, and that everything expressed by the object is exactly what he has long been wanting to express. The effect of the true work of art is to abolish in the consciousness of the perceiver the distinction between himself and the artist, and not only between himself and the artist, but also between himself and all who perceive the same work of art. It is this liberation of the person from his isolation from others, from his loneliness, this merging of the person with others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and property of art.”
• Three conditions necessary to distinguish art from non-art: particularity, clarity, and sincerity.
  • The more particular, the more strongly it affects the perceived. The more clearly the feeling is expressed in the art;
  • the more infectious the feeling that arouses in the perceiver a feeling long known but only now expressed;
  • the more sincerely an artist conveys his feeling through his art, the better he infects perceivers with what he perceives. Sincerity blends this consciousness together in a way. The two other conditions are dependant on this condition, for a sincere artist will express his feelings as he has perceived them in a more deeply penetrating way, making it more particular and further force the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling he wishes to convey.
• “If it seems to us that there is no religious consciousness in society, that is not because there is none, but because we do not want to see it. And often we do not want to see it because it exposes our life, which often do not conform to it.”
• “The second consequence is that the works of art-amusement, produced in such frightful quantities by the army of professional artists, enable the wealthy people of our time to live a life that is not only unnatural but contrary to the principle of humaneness professed by these same people. To live as wealthy, idle people live, the women especially, away from nature and from animals, in artificial conditions, with muscles atrophied or abnormally developed by gymnastics, and with a weakened vital energy, would be impossible were it not for what is called art, were it not for the diversion, the amusement which turns these people’s eyes from the meaninglessness of their lives and saves them from the boredom that oppresses them. Take from all these people the theatres, concerts, exhibitions, piano playing, ballads, novels with which they occupy themselves in the conviction that this is a very refined, aesthetic and therefore good occupation … and they will be unable to go on with life, they will all die of boredom, tedium, the awarenes of the meaninglessness and lawlessness of their life. Only the occupation with what is considered art among them enables them, in violation of all natural conditions of life, to go on living without noticing the meaninglessness and cruelty of their life.”
  • This passage is very important. I think these days the majority of us now occupy these privileged positions. Our muscles are atrophying as our machines have picked up our slack, we numb ourselves with Netflix and YouTube and Twitter, we do not suffer and thus our lives have no meaning, so we drown ourselves in counterfeit art to distract ourselves.
• Some deleterious consequences of bad art are 1) the slaves to false art slave over nothing of moral value (the image of the ballerina contorting and mutilating herself to appease high society); 2) enables the idleness and unnatural lives of the wealthy class; 3) children both ingest this false art, which they cannot and should not understand, and are lured by the success of artists to become like them (rather than good moral examples); 4) general moral degradation through increasingly sexual and vain art
• “The art of our time and circle has become a harlot. And this comparison holds true in the smallest details. It is, in the same way. not limited in time, is always in fancy dress, is always for sale; it is just as alluring and pernicious.”
  • Whore of Babylon
• “Genuine art has no need for dressing up, like the wife of a loving husband. Counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.”
• “The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into everyday life, as the consequence of a wife’s love is the birth of a new person into life. The consequence of counterfeit art is the corruption of man, the insatiability of pleasures, the weakness of man’s spiritual force.”
• “…feeling can be born in a man only if he lives the many-sided life natural and proper for human beings. And that is why giving artists security in their material needs is the most harmful condition for artistic productivity, because it releases the artist from the condition proper to all men of struggling with nature to support his own and other people’s lives, and thereby deprives him of the occasion and the possibility of experiencing the most important feelings proper to human beings. No situation is more harmful for artistic productivity than the situation of complete security and luxury in which artists usually live in our society.”
• “Science and art are as closely tied to each other as lungs and hear so that if one organ is perverted, the other cannot function properly. True science studies and introduces into human consciousness the truths and the knowledge which are regarded as most important by the people of a certain period and society. Art transfers these truths from the realm of knowledge to the realm of feeling.“
• “There will be almost no need for man to labour, and thus all people will be able to give themselves to that same idleness to which the ruling upper classes now give themselves. Nothing shows more obviously than these ideals how far the science of our time has deviated from the true path. [… It] is forgotten that nourishment on bread, vegetables, fruits grown from the earth by one’s own labour is the most pleasant, healthful, light and natural nourishment, and that the work of exercising one’s muscles is as necessary a condition of life as the oxygenating of the blood by means of breathing.”