Leo Tolstoy  “What is Art?”  1897
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr6DYLBkyG0   For What is Art discussion start in at 7:00 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa6jEubs8DM
Student piece on Art as Expression.  Tolstoy discussed about half way through.
Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910

•	War and Peace 1869
•	Anna Karenina 1877
•	The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1886
•	What is Art?  1897
•	Resurrection 1899

Attacks ballet as useless:  this and the next ten slides refer to material not in our Ross selection.
•	“The ballet, in which half-naked women make voluptuous movements, twisting themselves into various sensual wreathings, is simply a lewd performance. So one is quite at a loss as to whom these things are done for. The man of culture is heartily sick of them, while to a real working man they are utterly incomprehensible.”
•	Next   Degas  Rehearsal on Stage, 1874, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

  Two definitions of beauty:  both bad because subjective
•	objective: mystical, merged into God, founded on nothing
•	 experimental:  simple, intelligible, subjective, “that which pleases”
•	Both definitions are the same subjective definition:  art is what makes beauty manifest, and beauty is that which pleases without exciting desire.

Aestheticians have asked why a thing pleases, converting the discussion to one about taste.  

•	But there is no explanation why one thing pleases one man and not another.
•	The [so-called] science of aesthetics fails to define the qualities and laws of art or of beauty or of taste, separating art from non-art.
•	Instead, it acknowledges certain things as art because they please us (a certain circle) and then devises a theory to fit that.

Against the art canon 
•	The art canon:  certain productions favored by “our circle” [Russian upper  classes] Phidias, Homer, Sophocles, etc.  [sculpture, painting, music, literature] and the aesthetic laws embracing all these productions
•	 Opinions about these are not based on certain laws that determine which works are good or bad.
•	All existing aesthetic standards are like this.  

•	No matter what insanities appear in art, once they are accepted by the upper classes a theory is invented to explain them. 
•	[Yet] there have been periods in which people recognized deformed art which was forgotten later.
•	The theory of art founded on beauty is nothing but the idea that what pleases the upper class is good.

To define a human activity one must understand its sense and importance.

•	One must examine the activity itself in relation to causes and effects, not merely in relation to pleasure.
•	The definition of an activity will be false if it says the aim is mere pleasure.
•	No one would think the aim of food was pleasure or that satisfying taste determines merit in food, i.e. that food with alcohol is the best food.
•	 The meaning of food lies in nourishment.

•	Those who try to define art in terms of pleasure transfer the question to an arena foreign to art, i.e. metaphysical, psychological, physiological or historical discussions of why something pleases someone -- making definition impossible.

The question he has been trying to answer has both moral and definitional aspects.
•	“What is this art to which is offered up the labor of millions, the very lives of men, and even morality itself?”  
•	No definition of art has been constructed because all efforts have been based on  beauty.
•	Rather, to define art it must be considered one of the conditions of human life, one of means of human intercourse.

Transmission of feeling.
•	 Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a relationship with the producer, and with previous and subsequent receivers of the same impression.
•	 Art, like speech, serves as a means to union among men.  
•	 By speech men transmit thoughts, by art men transmit feelings.
Beginning of our reading in Ross:  
•	A man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling can experience the other’s feeling.
•	One man laughs and another becomes merry.
•	 Others are infected by the same feelings.
•	The activity of art is based on this capacity to receive another’s expression of feeling.
•	If he infects another directly at the very time he feels the feeling this is not art.

The beginning and the goal of art.
•	Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.  

The boy and the wolf.  [Think Peter and the Wolf, written by Sergei Prokofiev 1936, USSR.]
•	The boy has fear encountering a wolf and, to evoke the feeling in others, describes his condition etc.
•	If he again experiences the feelings he lived through and infects the hearers then it is art.
•	Even if he had not seen a wolf but had the feeling of fear and makes up the story it is art.
•	This can happen on canvas,  in marble or in music too.  [Tolstoy’s theory of art is for all of the fine arts]
External Signs [in different media]
•	“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 the feelings – this is the activity of art”
•	Consciously, by means of external signs, feelings lived through…
Union with the author and others…
•	Art creates a union with the author and with others who have been moved by this work.
•	The degree of infectiousness is the measure of excellence in art.
•	But we are talking here about art apart from its subject-matter, not considering the quality of the feeling.

The degree of infectiousness depends on three conditions.

•	Greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted.
•	Greater or lesser clearness.
•	Sincerity of the artist, i.e. the force with which he feels the emotion [and whether it comes from inner need]

Individual, Clear, Sincere
•	Individual:  the more individual the feeling the more strongly does it act, and the more pleasure we get.
•	Clearness:  assists infection:  it seems to [the audience member] he has long known and felt it.
•	Most of all, the degree of sincerity:   if the writer writes for himself and not merely to act on others it infects the recipient.  Otherwise it repels.

Sincerity sums it up.
•	The three conditions may be summed up in sincerity:  the artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling.
•	Individual:  drawn from the depths of his nature.
•	Sincerity will compel the artist to find a clear expression.

•	[Art of his time that would be clearly understandable by all.]
•	Ivan Tsarevich catching the Firebird's feather, 1899

•	Wall Cabinet, Elena Polanova, Russia, 1880-1890
Peasant Art vs.
Counterfeit Art
•	The sincerity condition is always met in peasant art, and that is why such art acts so powerfully.
•	It is almost entirely absent from the upper-class where the artists are motivated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.
•	If any of the conditions is absent then it is a counterfeit art.

•	Peasant Art in Russia, ed. Charles Holme,  London: The Studio, 1912
Konstantin Makovskiy
Peasant Diner in Field,
1871

•	Typical example of upper class painting from the time:  Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes 1897  by John Singer Sargent
•	Next:  Jacek Malczewski – Vicious Circle  1897  Polish

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (oil on canvas), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, United States  1896
Begräbnis, Wassily Kandinsky. 1907
Merit:  all works are ranked according to how they meet the three conditions.
•	In one individuality may predominate, in another clearness, in another sincerity, etc.
Additional Material:  expansion of the concept of art.
What we hear and see in theaters, concerts, exhibitions, buildings, statues, poems, novels, is only the smallest part of art

All human life is filled with works of art:  cradlesong,  mimicry, ornamentation, church services, etc.  

And narrowing of the definition relative to subject matter…
•	Art is not all human activity transmitting feelings but such activity to which we attach special importance, i.e. from religious perception [what he later refers to as “brotherhood of man”]:  this is art in the full meaning of the word. 

How are we to decide what is good or bad in the subject matter of art?

From Chapter 16
•	“Art, like speech, is a means of communication, and therefore of progress, i.e., of the movement of humanity forward toward perfection….as the evolution of knowledge proceeds by truer and more necessary knowledge, dislodging and replacing what is mistaken and unnecessary, so the evolution of feeling proceeds through art – feelings less kind and less needful for the well-being of mankind are replaced by others kinder….  
Better Art
•	That is the purpose of art.  And, speaking now of its subject matter, the more art fulfills that purpose the better the art, and the less it fulfils it, the worse the art.”

The understanding of the meaning of life
•	“In every period of history, and in every human society, there exists an understanding of the meaning of life which presents the highest level to which men of that society have attained, an understanding defining the highest good at which that society aims.  And this understanding is the religious perception of the given time and society.” 

Religious Perception of our time
•	The religious perception of our time, in its widest and most practical application, is the consciousness of our well-being, both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among all men – in their loving harmony with one another.  

[the] Christian principle of universal union…forms the religious perception of our time
•	…the religious perception of our times does not select any one society of men; on the contrary, it demands the union of all – absolutely of all people without exception – and above every other virtue it sets brotherly love to all men.  And therefore, the feelings transmitted by the art of our time not only cannot coincide with the feelings transmitted by former art, but must run counter to them.

Feelings that unite men:  (1) our sonship to God, brotherhood of man (2) simple feelings…

•	only two kinds of feeling do unite all men: first, feelings flowing from the perception of our sonship to God and of the brotherhood of man; and next, the simple feeling of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquility, etc.  Only these two kinds of feelings can now supply material for art in its subject matter.

•	From What is Art?  Last page.  

Malcolm X, 1969