What Is Art? (Penguin Classics)

Unlike many works of aesthetics which tend to be overly abstract and dense, using technical terms from philosophy and a layering of sophisticated concepts, What is Art by Leo Tolstoy is as clear as clear can be, using language and ideas anybody can understand. Tolstoy is passionate about art and art's place within human experience. For many years, he tells us, he has been observing art and reading about art. And what he sees and reads is not pretty. For instance, he goes to a rehearsal of opera: "All is stopped, and the director, turning to the orchestra, attacks the French horn, scolding him in the rudest of terms, as cabmen abuse each other, for taking the wrong note." Seen through Tolstoy's eyes, the entire production is a ridiculous, grotesque, overblown extravagance. We can imagine Tolstoy shaking his head when he observes, "It would be difficult to find a more repulsive sight."Tolstoy goes on to give us a detailed sampling of what philosophers and aestheticians have written about art and beauty throughout history, particularly since the eighteenth century, when aesthetics became a subject unto itself. The theories range from art being an expression of divine truth to art being a titillation of the senses of seeing, hearing, feeling and even tasting and smelling. Tolstoy notes toward the end of his study, "Therefore, however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty."Further on in his work, Tolstoy gives us an example of a young art gallery-goer being baffled at the painting of the various modern schools of art, impressionism, post-impressionism and the like. Tolstoy empathizes with the gallery-goer and knows most other ordinary people share this same reaction, " . . . the majority of people who are in sympathy with me, do not understand the productions of the new art, simply because there is nothing in it to understand, and because it is bad art . . . " Why is this the case in the modern world? Tolstoy lays the blame on the artistic and spiritual fragmentation of a society divided by class, "As soon as ever the art of the upper classes separated itself from universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be incomprehensible to the masses."Tolstoy sees the modern institutionalization of art producing works that are degrading, meaningless and fake. He writes: "Becoming ever poorer and poorer in subject-matter, and more and more unintelligible in form, the art of the upper classes, in its latest productions, has even lost all the characteristics of art, and has been replaced by imitations of art." To compound the problem, Tolstoy tells us schools teaching art take mankind away from what is true in art, "To produce such counterfeits, definite rules or recipes exist in each branch of art." We come to see, with Tolstoy as our guide, how aspiring artists are given these counterfeits as models to follow and imitate; things have gone so far that creating art is reduced to `acquiring the knack'. Anybody who is familiar with the way in which writing is taught in today's colleges and universities will see how exactly right Tolstoy is on this point, as students are given a collection of essays written by modern writers in which to model their own writing.The book continues with Tolstoy providing more examples of false, muddled, insincere, bad art. His description of an opera by Richard Wagner is laugh out loud funny. We read: "This gnome, still opening his mouth in the same strange way, long continued to sing or shout." We are given the impression Tolstoy hated going to the theater to see an opera or ballet. He predicts art forms like opera or ballet could never and will never be appreciated and enjoyed by the common person. Actually, on this point, he was off by a mile. Turns out, for those who are at all inclined toward art, the average person today can't get enough of productions like the Nutcracker. Taking about being off by a mile, Tolstoy judges Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as bad art since it cannot be viewed as religious art nor does it unite people in one feeling; rather, the fifth symphony is, "long, confused, artificial". Goodness! Most everyday Joe work-a-day type people who are concert-goers would be thrilled if Beethoven's fifth was on the program. What else is bad art? He writes: "In painting we must similarly place in the class of bad art all the Church, patriotic, and exclusive pictures . . . "What then does Tolstoy regard as good art? In a word, art that is clear, sincere, and individual (as opposed to copying other art) as well as creating religious feelings and engendering the brotherhood of man. As examples, Tolstoy cites Dickens, Hugo, Dostoevsky and the painter Millet. You might not agree with Tolstoy on every point, but that is no reason to pass over a careful study of his views (after all, he is one of the world's great writers) on the question, `What is art?'.

This is the finest work on the subject of aesthetics I have ever read. It eschews the grandiose, unsubstantiated style of, well, every other work on aesthetics I've ever been exposed to, and has the courage to state clearly and plainly what Tolstoy thinks art is and how it works.Many definitions of art will arrive inevitably to discussions of beauty, and Tolstoy explains why this is problematic. It reminds me of what I have read before about the problem with the word "good": With every other adjective, a single quality is communicated that applies to whatever thing it is describing. So a round ball and a round fruit share a common attribute, the single quality of roundness. Similarly, a red pencil and a red bird share a common attribute of redness. With both of these cases, roundness means the same thing in the ball as it does in the fruit; and the same can be said for redness and the pencil and bird. But what if we talk about a good pencil, a good bird, a good ball, a good fruit? Is there one single quality---goodness---that applies to all four of these objects in exactly the same way? Clearly not. What makes a bird a good bird is not what makes a good pencil a good pencil. We might call a good bird one that has a nice, sweet song, but clearly pencils do not sing at all. Similarly, good fruits are ones that are healthy and delicious, while again, good pencils certainly don't taste good or provide nutritional benefit. Thus, the word "good" must be tailored to each thing that it describes, and in that sense is, if anything, a value judgment (or even an aesthetic judgment) rather than an objective description.The same, Tolstoy says, of the word "beauty." People have written tomes about the nature of beauty, and they frequently wax histrionic or cloying when, to borrow that sort of language, they kneel at the altar of beauty. But beauty, Tolstoy says, is indistinguishable from pleasure. A beautiful song is a pleasant song; a beautiful painting is a pleasant painting. Those who are inclined toward the cloying histrionics I described are probably white-knuckled by now, but if you stop for a moment and think clearly about it, I'd wonder if you wouldn't agree with Tolstoy. And if you do, you'll see that the word "beauty" is just like the word "good": it expresses a value judgment, but it fails categorically to address the actual question, which is, What is the NATURE of art?To say that the purpose of art is to create beauty is to fail to answer the question entirely. It's like saying the purpose of a bicycle is to be a good bicycle: Surely there are good bicycles and bad ones, beautiful ones and ugly ones, and everyone would prefer a good and beautiful bicycle to a bad and ugly one; but the objective description of what a bicycle is and does is absent from this pseudo-definition.Others have objected to Tolstoy's "puritanical" tastes, and perhaps there is something to that. Surely you can see, though, that such concerns fall more into the category of value judgment rather than objective description. In other words, if you're looking for an objective description of what art actually is, this book more than delivers, and as such it's worth reading for that reason alone, even if you disagree with Tolstoy's value judgments.So if you're interested in understanding what art is---what it does, what function it performs, by what mechanism it operates---I encourage you to read this book.AS AN UPDATE, JUNE 2014: Whenever I recall the memory of this book in my mind, it provides a freshness and a joy that I think one finds only a few times in one's life. They say that a serious reader will come across four or five books in their life that feels like it was written for them, and for me, this is one of those books. It is like a drop of water from heaven. It's a book that I wish more people would read, and would read sympathetically. So long as we remain humans, the sharing of emotions will be critical to the health of our society. In America today, many of the emotions that are shared in the spheres of politics and journalism are those of anger, frustration, and hatred. We all would do well to understand this, to steel ourselves up against the ingestion of negative emotions, and to do our best to communicate healthy, loving emotions to the people that we encounter in our lives. Though I am an atheist, I maintain that we should all strive to make of ourselves the Christian artists that Tolstoy lauds in this wonderful book.

This is a sensitive translation, with an excellent and wise introduction by Richard Pevear, one of the two translators, who is not afraid to peer beyond the wilful, challenging shortcomings of the great man, Tolstoy, in his declining years.In my view, this is a passionate and occasionally insightful polemic, many years in the making, but profoundly flawed.Tolstoy has a good point - I think - when he says that art is a means of communicating feeling: '"Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs." However, he drastically narrows what he considers as art within this broad category by saying that it must be concerned with elevating the 'good' (which he fails to define). This leads Tolstoy to condemn Dante, Shakespeare, Bach (bar one violin aria) and Beethoven, amongst others, while praising the most sentimental and moralistic works of Schiller, Victor Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher-Stowe. But what he really approves are folk tales and ancient sacred religious works (such as the Bible and the Buddha's sutras).He castigates art as beauty, which he says lowers it to mere taste or pleasure - especially the pleasure of the upper classes, for whom most art is produced. He deplores what he sees as the waste of the time and talent of hundreds of thousands of 'artists' and artisans, toiling to produce 'art' for the upper classes, paid for by the despised labour of the common man - epitomised by his back-stage visit to an unnamed Romantic-Classical opera, where he sees an ordinary working man looking dazed and out-of-place in a temple of falsehood. He is interesting on the imitative weakness of much art, since (he says) it "ceased to be sincere and became artificial and cerebral."For Tolstoy, art must be in the service of his own radical vision of a dogma-free and abstract Christianity. He says that the essence of Christianity is the brotherhood of man, which seems reasonable. But he will not accept as art anything which does not explicitly promote this idea. He deplores the vast bulk of artistic expression (including his nearly all of his own works), since (and including) the Renaissance - because of a lack of religious sincerity, which Tolstoy says led to a profound divorce between the elite and the masses. Again, this is a plausible perspective (which TS Eliot also argued), but Tolstoy's essay is more rant than reason.The book starts with a potted history of European philosophers of aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the purpose of which is to debunk them all, as decadent. Tolstoy quotes from several poets, and particularly inveighs against Baudelaire and Verlaine, for (as he sees it) their impenetrability and because they do not praise the 'good'.There are many things to question in Tolstoy's argument, not least his assumption of a monolithic and unchanging common 'people', who are the touchstone of reality, though the 'people' themselves are allowed no individuality or development or variety. Meanwhile, the upper class elite, and of course the entrepreneurs and merchants, are universally self-seeking and at best insincere and shallow, at worst evilly exploitative. Similarly, he refers to 'nations' and a fixed 'canon' of great art as if these cultural constructs are eternal and uniform. He dictates that art must be moralistic, according to Christian norms (as he sees them). He ignores discussion of any aspect of the skill involved in 'art', and he fails to make the case for why art should matter in the first place.In a word, Tolstoy is at his most infuriatingly dogmatic in this work (completed in 1897 but published in English because of problems with the Russian censors). I think the problem is that his judgementalism is unleavened by compassion or humility.As Pevear says, 'Tolstoy's heaven is empty'. This angry essay is evidence of a great mind brought low by a great ego.

In this rather astonishing text, Leo Tolstoy explains his vision on art and the aim of art.Art, Religion, Classes, ProfessionalismFor Leo Tolstoy, art is a human activity which consists in conveying feelings (emotions) by external signs. Art doesn't consist in creating beauty or pleasure or in expressing emotions, but in infecting people with feelings. The worth of these feelings is determined by the religious consciousness (Christianity) of what is good or bad. The basic good is the brotherly life of all people. The purpose of art consists in transferring from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that people's well-being lies in being united and in establishing in the place of violence the Kingdom of God (love).The upper classes, however, have lost faith. They reduced art to the conveying of feelings of vanity, amusement and sexual lust. Art became artificial, insincere and perverted. In one word, a harlot.Sincerity was also significantly weakened when artists became professionals.Artistic means and endsLeo Tolstoy's `Christian' art can be religious (conveying feelings regarding God) or universal (conveying the simplest everyday feelings of life).Deliberate concealments to arouse curiosity, revealing new aspects or angles on reality or putting question marks in a work are hindering, not helping, the artistic impression. Hermeneutic poetry is false art, while realism and naturalism are not more than counterfeits of reality.EvaluationIndeed, an essence of art is the conveying of feelings (emotions) into the reader, the listener or the spectator. But, religious consciousness (Christianity) cannot be the (sole) criterion to make a decision about good or bad art. Art can convey (emotional) messages about political and social realities (war, peace), about human psychology (love, hate) or even about possible realities (anticipation).The messages can, of course, be conveyed in an attractive way, arousing the curiosity of the consumer.The analysis of hermeneutic poetry is perhaps not worth the effort (ultimately sometimes only hiding simple feelings), but L. Tolstoy's examples are quite understandable.In fine, L. Tolstoy's argument about `simple feelings' becomes a caricature, when he dismisses Goethe's Faust as not more than an imitation of former works by other writers, or, when he calls Beethoven's latter works (including his 9th Symphony) artistic gibberish, because when Beethoven composed them he was deaf.This controversial text can only be recommended to Leo Tolstoy fans and art scholars.

You definitely get more out of this book if you have a background understanding of philosophy, religion, psychology and sociology. It is hard going (not my usual bedtime read) and I've never read any of Tolstoy's books but was told that this was a good starter before progressing onto War and Peace. I found this really interesting, it changes your perspective on the way you view art in society forever. Like many things, it is socially constructed. Contributes to me developing a more objective opinion about the world in which we live in.

Perhaps I expected too much from this so it was bound to disappoint. I was attracted to read this by something I picked up about Tostoy years ago and was always on my mind since, something he said about most of what is found in our museum is not real, genuine art but that there's a lot of 'secondhand' experience (and I'm not saying that that in itself is a bad thing). But I was hoping for more insight into what makes our greatest art, well, our greatest art, How/why does art come about? I found his thinking lacks insight into process.

It is a belief reiterated a few times too many. Who the upper class are (who are clearly despised) we might never know.