What Is Art? (2)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy.
In chapters five through ten of What Is Art?, Tolstoy tells the sorry story of how we came to think that the purpose of art is beauty and personal enjoyment. We used to have true religion, which was the expression of the greatest thought of the finest men. It lent us our value system, and we judged art accordingly.
Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life accessible to the best and foremost men at a given time in a given society; a comprehension towards which, inevitably and irresistibly, all the rest of that society must advance. And therefore only religions have always served, and still serve, as bases for the valuation of human sentiments. If feelings bring men nearer the ideal their religion indicates, if they are in harmony with it and do not contradict it, they are good; if they estrange men from it and oppose it, they are bad.
By the time of the Renaissance, true religion had fallen apart. The papacy was obviously corrupt, but apart from Saint Francis of Assisi, the wealthy nobles could not embrace the full implications of Christianity and give up their lifestyles. Instead they concocted a theory that the Greeks, who had developed an art of the sensual body because their religion was base, had equated the good and the beautiful. The person most to blame for the ensuing apologetics, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, introduced flimflam into the world on the scale of Malthusian economics and Marxist historiography. Tolstoy’s assessment of this history is undiluted acid.
However unfounded such theories are, however contrary to all that is known and confessed by humanity, and however obviously immoral they may be, they are accepted with credulity, pass uncriticised, and are preached, perchance for centuries, until the conditions are destroyed which they served to justify, or until their absurdity has become too evident. To this class belongs this astonishing theory of the Baumgartenian Trinity—Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, according to which it appears that the very best that can be done by the art of nations after 1900 years of Christian teaching, is to choose as the ideal of their life the ideal that was held by a small, semi-savage, slave-holding people who lived 2000 years ago, who imitated the nude human body extremely well, and erected buildings pleasant to look at. All these incompatibilities pass completely unnoticed. Learned people write long, cloudy treatises on beauty as a member of the æsthetic trinity of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; das Schöne, das Wahre, das Gute; le Beau, le Vrai, le Bon, are repeated, with capital letters, by philosophers, æstheticians and artists, by private individuals, by novelists and by feuilletonistes, and they all think, when pronouncing these sacrosanct words, that they speak of something quite definite and solid—something on which they can base their opinions. In reality, these words not only have no definite meaning, but they hinder us in attaching any definite meaning to existing art; they are wanted only for the purpose of justifying the false importance we attribute to an art that transmits every kind of feeling if only those feelings afford us pleasure.
This was a phenomenon of the elites, and soon the arts devolved into an exercise of elite proclivities. Tolstoy claims that all upper-class art only has three subjects, “the feelings of pride, discontent with life, and, above all, of sexual desire.” Tolstoy mocked the resulting literature: “One hero kissed his lady on her palm, another on her elbow, and a third somewhere else.”
But Tolstoy was just getting warmed up. In Chapter Ten he excoriates Baudelaire and Verlaine for leading a school of unintelligible writing.
When a universal artist (such as were some of the Grecian artists or the Jewish prophets) composed his work, he naturally strove to say what he had to say in such a manner that his production should be intelligible to all men. But when an artist composed for a small circle of people placed in exceptional conditions, or even for a single individual and his courtiers,—for popes, cardinals, kings, dukes, queens, or for a king’s mistress,—he naturally only aimed at influencing these people, who were well known to him, and lived in exceptional conditions familiar to him. And this was an easier task, and the artist was involuntarily drawn to express himself by allusions comprehensible only to the initiated, and obscure to everyone else. In the first place, more could be said in this way; and secondly, there is (for the initiated) even a certain charm in the cloudiness of such a manner of expression. This method, which showed itself both in euphemism and in mythological and historical allusions, came more and more into use, until it has, apparently, at last reached its utmost limits in the so-called art of the Decadents. It has come, finally, to this: that not only is haziness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness (shutting out the masses) elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic art, but even incorrectness, indefiniteness, and lack of eloquence are held in esteem.
Contemporary art he regards as humbug, as he relates the notes of an “amateur of art”—in actuality, his eldest daughter, as per a footnote—who subjected herself to some exhibitions.
“I was to-day at three exhibitions: the Symbolists’, the Impressionists’, and the Neo-Impressionists’. I looked at the pictures conscientiously and carefully, but again felt the same stupefaction and ultimate indignation. The first exhibition, that of Camille Pissarro, was comparatively the most comprehensible, though the pictures were out of drawing, had no subject, and the colourings were most improbable. The drawing was so indefinite that you were sometimes unable to make out which way an arm or a head was turned. The subject was generally, ‘effets’—Effet de brouillard, Effet du soir, Soleil couchant. There were some pictures with figures, but without subjects.
It was downhill from the Impressionists.
“From there I went to see the Symbolists. I looked at them long without asking anyone for an explanation, trying to guess the meaning; but it is beyond human comprehension. One of the first things to catch my eye was a wooden haut-relief, wretchedly executed, representing a woman (naked) who with both hands is squeezing from her two breasts streams of blood. The blood flows down, becoming lilac in colour. Her hair first descends and then rises again and turns into trees. The figure is all coloured yellow, and the hair is brown. … At last I asked a gentleman who was there what it meant, and he explained to me that the haut-relief was a symbol, and that it represented ‘La Terre.’”
I appreciate Tolstoy’s independence of thought. He dismissed all of aesthetics as a decadent byproduct of the failure of Christianity since the Renaissance. On the other hand, he’s almost certainly wrong about the mechanism of value emanating from religion. The Chinese, whom he cites approvingly, were Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianist, more or less all at once. All of these creeds value temperance and self-restraint. Surely, there are works of Chinese art that reinforce this thesis:
If the meaning of life is seen in the well-being of one’s nation, or in honouring one’s ancestors and continuing the mode of life led by them, as was the case among the Romans and the Chinese respectively, then art transmitting feelings of joy at sacrificing one’s personal well-being for the common weal, or at exalting one’s ancestors and maintaining their traditions, would be considered good art; but art expressing feelings contrary to this would be regarded as bad. If the meaning of life is seen in freeing oneself from the yoke of animalism, as is the case among the Buddhists, then art successfully transmitting feelings that elevate the soul and humble the flesh will be good art, and all that transmits feelings strengthening the bodily passions will be bad art.
But China also produced some of the most lovable and eloquent drunks in all of human history. We’re still reading their poetry. Something more complicated is going on than artistic sanction emanating from religion.
I’m willing to entertain the claim that Christianity is superior to Greek paganism. It’s hard to imagine those cults of sex and drugs as being any more spiritually satisfying than a modern nightclub. Tolstoy’s Christianity, realized as the loving brotherhood of man, is unimpeachable. But to characterize Greek art as excellent imitation of the human body is not giving them nearly enough credit, even regarding the subset of Greek art to which that remark pertains. What they did with the human form is poetry. It is not merely the expression of pleasure, but passion.
I’m also willing to entertain the idea that aesthetics from Baumgarten to the contemporaries of Tolstoy is mostly bunk. Clement Greenberg says somewhere that you can look at utter giants—he mentions Kant, Benedetto Croce, and Suzanne Langer—attempting to deal with aesthetics and not really pinpointing the heart of the matter. (He didn’t claim to himself, but he also didn’t claim to be a philosopher.) But Tolstoy’s idea that art is an infection of emotion is starting to look a little shabby by the time he, via his daughter, is pooh-poohing Pissarro, and—come on—all of the Symbolists. There is something to be said for basking in the effect of art without demanding meaning. Yes, that can degenerate into a ridiculous exercise, but so can insistence on meaning.
Finally, pleasure can be profound. I very much want to see this sculpture of the woman squeezing streams of lilac blood from her breasts. Certainly much insubstantial art has been made in an attempt to glorify pleasure. But also much insubstantial art has been made in an attempt to glorify Jesus. All hinges on the quality of the glorification, and Tolstoy seems to be missing that piece in his conception of how art works.
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
Pick a theme, a subject, an audience... Michelangelo didn't determine those things depicted in the Sistine Ceiling. They were common themes imposed by the pope, by then having been addressed countless times from countless perspectives by countless artists. So, what distinguishes that ceiling? What distinguishes any art? Treatment. "All hinges on the quality of the glorification." A pretty good way of saying it. What is remembered from experiencing Art? Isn't it the arrangement, the integration of that arrangement, which resonates with some internal integration? The experience of that is a mysterious thing, a perfume, the butterfly which escapes from anyone I know of (including, for instance, Plato and Aristotle) who has tried to pin it, wriggling, to a specimen card with a label (in Latin?).
Largely agreed. Think of it: The Greek gods and goddesses were a complex brew that probably went back beyond 1200 BC. Around 150 BC the Romans overran Greece. At this point Greece's history went back over a thousand years. Bizarrely, following their victory, the Romans appropriated the Greek Olympians, renaming all but Apollo. I suspect this was one of many humiliations the "pagans" lived through. They would have been aware that the gods hardly lifted a finger to these aspersions. And that gods like Apollo became politicized, ostensibly serving one Caesar or another. Cynicism would have been overt, and the old divine front ripe for puncture. Along came Christianity. If you were a believer in the old ways, you died and went to some shadowy gloom in the underworld. If you followed Jesus, you went to a glorious heaven. Quite seductive as a religious pitch. The righteous didn't start knocking down temples and bashing statues (by the tens of thousands) until around 400 AD, and by then the gods had had enough. I like to think they slunk away to more interesting things. :-)