Philosophy Now Forum

“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 7:45 pm Art was once and not too long ago an intense polarity leading from the mundane to the exceptional and from there to the sublime. Most of this has disappeared. What now serves to enhance emotion is of a far more vulgar kind called sports because it's only that stupid shit one hears about incessantly. Even the mundane becomes ever more diminished and art as one of the main historical features of the so-called human spirit is dead, dead, dead!

Long live art...or better still, forget about it entirely!

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 7:45 pm Art was once and not too long ago an intense polarity leading from the mundane to the exceptional and from there to the sublime. Most of this has disappeared. What now serves to enhance emotion is of a far more vulgar kind called sports because it's only that stupid shit one hears about incessantly. Even the mundane becomes ever more diminished and art as one of the main historical features of the so-called human spirit is dead, dead, dead!

Long live art...or better still, forget about it entirely!

-1- wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 9:18 pm

...or Art Daruber, the world-famous centreback for the Leafs.

Many years of pondering on questions of aesthetics and the place of art in life resulted in the pamphlet What is Art? (1898), in which Tolstoy attacked most of the recognized authorities of the past, including Shakespeare, Goethe, and Beethoven, for having produced works that were unintelligible to ordinary people, ultimately leading to the decadent 'artists' of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly Wagner, all of whom, as Tolstoy argued, merely catered to the depraved tastes of an idle social élite. As counter-examples of true Christian art he singled out for praise works by Schiller, Victor Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, and Dostoyevsky. The folksongs of all countries were also "true art" in his view since they were inspired by real emotions and could communicate these to others, in contrast to the "artificial" music of Beethoven's late period. As for his own literary works, Tolstoy condemned these, too, as the products of youthful vanity and ambition, but in the years that followed he still continued writing fiction, notably the short novel Hadji Murat, which was not published until after his death.

Dubious wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 10:41 pm

-1- wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 9:18 pm

...or Art Daruber, the world-famous centreback for the Leafs.

Is that the world-famous brother of Art Darunter?

In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.

Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

[…]

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. … And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

This core quality of art Tolstoy calls its “infectiousness,” and upon the artist’s ability to “infect” others depends the very recognition of something as art:

"If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them................"