Overview
Tolstoy treats art as a social and moral form of communication, making the book a useful argument to test against more aesthetic theories.
This title is catalogued in Art & Aesthetics. Its reading profile is Medium and Advanced, with themes including art, beauty, emotion, morality, society.
One-Page Summary
Tolstoy’s What Is Art? begins with a problem that sounds harmless but quickly becomes radical: what exactly makes something art? Tolstoy rejects the idea that art should be defined primarily by beauty or by the pleasure it gives an elite audience. Instead, he argues that art is a form of emotional communication. An artist experiences a feeling and, through artistic expression, causes another person to share something of that feeling. This makes sincerity and the ability to communicate experience more important than technical prestige. Tolstoy therefore attacks art that he regards as artificial, obscure, or designed mainly to flatter sophisticated tastes.
He is especially suspicious of artistic systems that depend on luxury, specialized culture, and the separation of art from ordinary human life. His argument eventually becomes moral as well as aesthetic: because art can create shared feeling between people, it can strengthen or weaken human solidarity depending on what it communicates. Tolstoy’s standards are deliberately demanding, and modern readers may disagree with many of his judgments about particular artists and styles. But the book remains fascinating because it forces a basic distinction: is art valuable because it is beautiful, difficult, technically impressive, commercially successful, or because it allows one human consciousness to reach another?
Tolstoy chooses the last of these and builds an entire theory of art around the consequences of that choice.
Key Themes
Art: This title is tagged with art as one of its main themes.
Beauty: This title is tagged with beauty as one of its main themes.
Emotion: This title is tagged with emotion as one of its main themes.
Morality: This title is tagged with morality as one of its main themes.
Society: This title is tagged with society as one of its main themes.
Religion: This title is tagged with religion as one of its main themes.