What is art?
What is art? Does it matter? What makes it worth the labor and suffering of so many people?
Art is often described as the expression of beauty. Then what is beauty? In aesthetics, a number of philosophers have tried to explain beauty, but their explanations can broadly be summarized in two statements:
- Beauty exists in itself and is absolutely perfect.
- Beauty is a form of satisfaction.
According to Tolstoy, both reduce beauty to pleasure, leaving us with nothing more than a subjective conception of beauty. Therefore, it is irrational to connect art to beauty.
Instead, he sees art as a form of communication through which artists share impressions, emotions, and ideas with audiences across time. He states that art is an essential part of human life based on the human ability to be infected (заражаться) by the emotions of others.
He also regards intention as a prerequisite for art: art only comes into being when someone deliberately seeks to convey their own emotional experience to others.
He argues that art has degenerated into a form of pleasure, which makes it inaccessible to the general public. He takes it for granted that the less ambiguity and complexity a work of art has, and the fewer elements it contains, the better it is.
This directly conflicts with my own definition of “good” art even if I largely resonate with his definition of art. And I believe that the higher dimensions an art is, the better it is. I’ll explore this in my next article.