But the artwork may capture some of it, and express it.
And we also have Ross’s words -
When asked about his relaxed and calm approach, (Ross) said, “I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, ‘Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy.’ That’s for sure. That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.”
To evoke feelings. This is perhaps the most accurate description of true art. I have nothing to argue with here, nor anything to criticize Tolstoy’s opinion for.
Not saying this is wrong, but what does it really contribute? Can you think of any artifact that doesn’t evoke feelings? Even a shit-smeared canvas will evoke feelings. I wonder if more precision is needed to make this particularly apropos. Thoughts?
Your very presence on this forum, Tom, evokes certain feelings in me. And even these useless discussions (about useless discussions, too).
I’ve already shared my personal story. I’m far from artistic. However, the girl who aroused my feelings took me to an art gallery, where she essentially repeated Tolstoy’s words, word for word. “You don’t like this painting, but ‘don’t like’ is also a feeling that the artist, even without realizing it, has created in you, and therefore achieved his goal.”
My philosophical view on this is this: feelings—whether good or bad—are the essence of any creation, from a painting to a religion. And the fact that we like it or not (one could spend a long time trying to figure out the basis for that) is what drives everything. That’s what I think. Can you argue with me?
I am art, then?
The issue with this is that there is pretty much nothing on earth that doesn’t evoke feelings, so how useful is this as a test of whether something is art or not—or of skilled art, versus less skilled art (or whatever one’s criterion of value might be)? If everything evokes feeling, then the category seems to become somewhat meaningless. Thoughts?
Art is is the connection it makes between artist and observer.
I don’t know what that means.
I’m not sure that I can say it any better than Tolstoy did, as quoted in the OP
The Tolstoy frame doesn’t resonate with me.
Okay. Well, it does resonate with me. I’m not sure that I would call it a “frame” though - maybe viewing it that way stands in the way of comprehending what Tolstoy means.
The only good thing about searching for a definition of art is that the effort always fails.
Much as I admire Tolstoy, What is Art? is a polemic against the elitist art of his time. He wanted to say “That’s not art,” instead of just “That’s bad art.” A familiar urge, and one we encounter in everyday life—but not an especially philosophical one.
But that’s still better than the urge of some philosophers to pin art down, to establish once and for all what art is and is not. Tolstoy wasn’t motivated by that kind of zeal for conceptual neatness, and along the way he says some interesting things, even if we can see the agenda behind them.
More charitably, I might interpret Tolstoy, the OP, and several posts in this discussion as exploring what actually existing art happens to be and what it has been in the past. It’s motivated by curiosity, or by a wish to emphasize what one personally values in art.
And that’s fine. What I’d say is that you don’t have to define it to do that.
Let’s have a look at what philosophers are actually trying to do when they try to define art. Writing about the philosophy of art in 1956, Morris Weitz wrote…
Its main avowed concern remains the determination of the nature of art which can be formulated into a definition of it. It construes definition as the statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined, where the statement purports to be a true or false claim about the essence of art, what characterizes and distinguishes it from everything else.
— Morris Weitz, The Role of Theory in Aesthetics
The question arises: why? What is the motivation? I’ve seen claims that without a definition, artworks cannot be properly evaluated, because which aspect of art the definition emphasizes determines what we should look for when assessing it—expression, beauty, form, originality, and so on.
It’s easy to see why this might have seemed important in the 20th century in particular, the century of Malevich’s Black Square, Duchamp’s Fountain, and Warhol’s soup cans, not to mention late 20th century conceptual art. Philosophers of art have been confused by this situation.
But Weitz argues that…
[Aesthetic theory’s] main contention that “art” is amenable to real or any kind of true definition is false. Its attempt to discover the necessary and sufficient properties of art is logically misbegotten for the very simple reason that such a set and, consequently, such a formula about it, is never forthcoming. Art, as the logic of the concept shows, has no set of necessary and sufficient properties; hence a theory of it is logically impossible and not merely factually difficult.
— Morris Weitz
Weitz argues that this is because “What is art?” is the wrong question. We should begin with “What sort of concept is ‘art’?” Following Wittgenstein, he says that it’s an open concept.
If we actually look and see what it is that we call “art,” we will also find no common properties—only strands of similarities.
— Morris Weitz
And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67
It’s not that we haven’t found the common properties yet. It’s that art is inherently open: new works, movements, original and suprising gestures will always arise that we want to call art, but that might not share the features of what came before. To define would be to close this off in advance and would therefore be not just incomplete but positively hostile to what artists actually do.
In a previous post I said this:
I used the word ‘paradigmatic’ very deliberately, to resist the pull toward definition. Something can be a paradigm case, i.e., a clear, central example of its kind, without its features becoming necessary conditions that everything else must meet.
That art moves us, or transmits the feeling of the artist to the artee, might be paradigmatic fibres. It doesn’t follow that they run right through the thread. For example, I would argue that a lot of conceptual art provokes puzzlement and intellectual engagement, without being especially concerned about moving us or transmitting feelings. Duchamp’s Fountain again: the idea that this object is meant to move us emotionally seems quite absurd.
But I have a two-sided view. On one side there’s Weitz-Wittgenstein, and on the other side there’s Adorno.
I started this post with a slogan: The only good thing about searching for a definition of art is that the effort always fails. This is the idea that trying to pin down the concept of art is exactly what shows us that it can’t be pinned down. And it’s a bit deeper than this: every time we try it, we see how art escapes our attempts to capture it.
And Adorno would ask: why that paradigm, and not this? Isn’t that paradigm just whatever happens to be socially acceptable in a particular historical situation, while other works of creativity are pushed to the sidelines unfairly? So even if transmitting the artist’s feelings is a paradigm, maybe it’s not a good one.
Aside from paradigms, from Adorno’s point of view, definitions are even worse. It’s a perfect example of identity-thinking, the indentification of things with our concepts, as if the concepts we apply exhaust the reality of the thing. For Adorno, this is an act of violence and domination. Even just the idea that art is what we create to transmit our emotions to others does violence, because it authorizes Tolstoy and others to loudly proclaim, “That’s not art!” and thereby consign different kinds of human creativity to the flames.
In other words, art is bigger than any definition we might come up with. But perhaps unlike Weitz-Wittgenstein, I’d say that the attempts have value and are worth paying close attention to. In the way they fail, they tell us something about art, and about the society in which the attempt was made. Each definition reveals how and why art escapes it.
Any attempt to articulate a view is, inevitably, a frame. It is a framework for looking at art, and in this case I think it’s sloppy and soaked in nineteenth century Romanticism.
A primary problem is the assumption that a viewer will automatically feel the same emotion the artist was expressing. This is nonsense. It is entirely possible for art to be intended to convey one thing and yet be experienced quite differently by its audience. It is still art, and may even be great art.
I do not subscribe to the idea that an artist passes on their feelings to others as if those emotions were contagious in the manner of a common cold.
This is the nub of it for me.
Nice. A fine understanding.
Art may be many things, but if it evokes no feeling or emotion in the observer/reader/listener, it cannot be classified as art. That emotion originates with the artist.
I suppose the following quote sums up the problem nicely:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not ~ Blaise Pascal (Pensées)
Personally I think art can be defined, but to do so will require a) depth and breadth of artistic knowledge, b) resources to carry out the analysis. It isn’t going to be a walk in the park and so here we are, without a definition. Until someone can and does get around to putting in the required effort we’ll continue to mistake impracticality for art.
I think it is almost completely empty to say an artwork is a work that conveys emotion. You can look at a brick wall and feel emotion.
Tolstoy is saying that the same emotions the artist puts into the work are felt by the audience. Whereas I would argue any emotion felt by an audience will be their own. And over time an artwork can change emotional character from something that began as serious and noble to something later seen as dubious and worthy of scorn. The Birth of a Nation comes to mind in this category.
I am not a Tolstoy’s fan and do not subscribe to the description he provided regarding art. I don’t like the overly dramatic portrayal of what art should be. I mean look at the attitude of Leonardo da Vinci towards art – how to draw the anatomy, study color theory, design, composition, and scale. Yes, proportion, even in cubism. I like tenebrism, not sfumato. I like representationalist art, not the fantastic. So, I am very drawn to still life paintings.
As to the architecture and the way buildings are designed, I like several artists, for example Friedensreich Hundertwasser style – paintings and architecture.
Again, you describe what I thought when I watched his video. It is a good sleep-inducing medium.
A skillfully constructed brick wall, like the one in your example, evokes certain emotions in me (I admire the builders’ skill). A poorly constructed brick wall does the same (especially if I have one at home). So, yes, a brick wall is also art and also evokes emotions. In general, anything that someone else (or you yourself) has a hand in creating has the potential to evoke emotions – it can be beautiful or ugly, painstakingly crafted or haphazardly executed. It’s surprising, but even a trinket printed on a 3D printer can evoke emotions – after all, it was the person who chose the material and designed the shape, thought about it, and invested a part of themselves into it.
Defining art, I would define it as anything that has been touched by human hands. Anything that they have created with intention, directing their thoughts toward the final object they desired.
For example, a stone under your feet is unlikely to evoke emotions, but the same stone (chosen from a thousand others) presented as a souvenir can already evoke emotions (for example, it can be in the shape of a heart, or be a certain color, or simply a stone from the sea where you were vacationing).
What does “directing their thoughts towards the final object the desired” mean?