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A review by thexwalrus
What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
challenging
4.0
i disagreed with about 60% of the points tolstoy brought up in this work, but that's why i'm rating it as high as i am. it made me think and challenged me and i feel like i have a fuller understanding of my own feelings towards art, even though i thought i understood those feelings pretty well before!
tolstoy has a pretty puritanical view of art that i can't vibe with - the only "good art" is art that promotes the "christian consciousness" and he takes time to tell us that catholicism is a bastardization of christianity and does not count, which was an aside i wasn't expecting. but he also brings up that art should be accessible to all, that the commodification of art harms art itself, and that art is a vital organ and a vital method of communicating for humanity. i agree with all those points!
he cites poems and symphonies and composers he thinks are "unintelligible" and the poetry made me laugh - it's base-level symbolism from like, senior year honors english. it's the easiest symbolism to understand, tolstoy, you good? he also has the audacity to say confidently that beethoven's 9th symphony is "unquestionably" bad art, which made me laugh because the knowledge that the catholic church uses the final movement from beethoven's 9th as a hymn in their masses would probably kill the man.
he spends a lot of time talking about how sexual lasciviousness is permeating art and making it worse, but a few pages earlier he's praising victor hugo (and victor hugo was a fan of sexual lasciviousness, iykyk). he calls his own writing bad. he talks about how art can only be made if people do "the labor that is right for man to do" which is very "you have to be miserable to make art" and Not Necessary. he calls monet, one of my favorite painters of all time, bad and a counterfeit artist. but that's what made this enjoyable to read for me. i was either arguing with tolstoy in my head, nodding along because he was making good points, or laughing at him for how he looked so unfavorably on art that has withstood the test of time and has reached me, a lower class disabled woman in the future who, in his eyes, would never understand that art.
if you have any interest in media literacy or art as a medium (especially in regards to keeping AI art bros out of the art scene) i think this is an invaluable read - even if you're gonna be laughing at tolstoy's points for a lot of it.
tolstoy has a pretty puritanical view of art that i can't vibe with - the only "good art" is art that promotes the "christian consciousness" and he takes time to tell us that catholicism is a bastardization of christianity and does not count, which was an aside i wasn't expecting. but he also brings up that art should be accessible to all, that the commodification of art harms art itself, and that art is a vital organ and a vital method of communicating for humanity. i agree with all those points!
he cites poems and symphonies and composers he thinks are "unintelligible" and the poetry made me laugh - it's base-level symbolism from like, senior year honors english. it's the easiest symbolism to understand, tolstoy, you good? he also has the audacity to say confidently that beethoven's 9th symphony is "unquestionably" bad art, which made me laugh because the knowledge that the catholic church uses the final movement from beethoven's 9th as a hymn in their masses would probably kill the man.
he spends a lot of time talking about how sexual lasciviousness is permeating art and making it worse, but a few pages earlier he's praising victor hugo (and victor hugo was a fan of sexual lasciviousness, iykyk). he calls his own writing bad. he talks about how art can only be made if people do "the labor that is right for man to do" which is very "you have to be miserable to make art" and Not Necessary. he calls monet, one of my favorite painters of all time, bad and a counterfeit artist. but that's what made this enjoyable to read for me. i was either arguing with tolstoy in my head, nodding along because he was making good points, or laughing at him for how he looked so unfavorably on art that has withstood the test of time and has reached me, a lower class disabled woman in the future who, in his eyes, would never understand that art.
if you have any interest in media literacy or art as a medium (especially in regards to keeping AI art bros out of the art scene) i think this is an invaluable read - even if you're gonna be laughing at tolstoy's points for a lot of it.