Sunday Morning! “What is Art?” by Leo Tolstoy

Mercer Street Used Books & Records, 206 Mercer St., NYC.

For a while now, I’ve been working on a long rambling essay (can you believe it?!) about the singer/songwriter Laura Nyro, spurred by discovering that her brilliant series of albums from the late 60s, all recorded when she was in her early 20s, are things that now you couldn’t give away in used record stores, while many of the singers she either wrote for or inspired deeply are still considered “legends.” I’ve tried to figure out why the relative forgetting of Laura Nyro troubles me and, in the process, I’ve also been trying to describe her strange and intuitive music, which borrows from various genres, while creating its own musical language, time signatures, and even neologisms to describe what are fairly basic universal emotions.

And it occurred to me at one point that this is as good a definition as any for the practice of “art”: the use of a singular language to describe universal emotional experiences.

Or, it’s close enough to how I understand art. The problem with most aesthetic theories is they tend to be fairly vague. A wide number of human activities can be classified as “art”; and quite often, when we describe something as a “work of art” in the most positive and affirmative sense, we’re actually describing a non-cognitive emotional response in ourselves. We feel something, triggered by something someone else has created, and then try to find the right words. “I don’t know art, but I know what I like,” as the old line has it.

Not coincidentally, this week I’ve also been reading Leo Tolstoy’s book What is Art?, which I found in the great Mercer Street Books and Records. It was written at a time (the tail end of the1800s) when aesthetic speculation had reached pandemic levels. The discipline of “aesthetics” was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 to mean epistêmê aisthetikê: “the science of what is sensed and imagined.” Speculation about what might count as art, or more specifically, good art, and how we can tell, blossomed throughout the 18th and 19th century, as religious standards of art lost their explanatory power. By the time of Tolstoy’s essay, aesthetic criticism, artistic production, and the academic study of art were treated with something of the reverence the church had once commanded. Tolstoy had, by this time, become essentially a Christian anarchist and denounced almost all of those contemporary standards, along with the church, quite a bit of his own writing, and much of the thinking of his time. For him, the question what is art? was more morally pressing than it is for most of us. He wanted art to create a universal religious consciousness.

So, his criticisms of aestheticians of the era are coming from a very different place, but it’s not as if they’re entirely wrong. He attacks a number of German philosophers of the century who vaguely defined “Art” (in the highest sense) as “Beauty”- something that’s just as hard to define! When pressed on this, many would then explain that “Beauty” is defined as something “Perfect,” perhaps a metaphysical quality outside of man. Okay… Or, they would take another tack and say Beauty is a certain “pleasure” we experience that has no obvious utility. So, then, everything is good art for someone, an attitude that basically dominates today.

Things were different, however: in Tolstoy’s time, art was already a profession, but its audience and economics were different. One of the things we have to keep in mind when reading “What is Art?” is that what Tolstoy describes as popular art is basically what we consider “folk art”- local songs and stories, which are not created for a mass audience- while his idea of elitist academic “Art”- the symbolists, Wagner, Decadent art, most novels of the era- were specifically created for a wealthy bourgeois audience. In other words, there was nothing in between like today’s “mass media”; writing drawing room dramas for wealthy spectators was “where the money is.”

And, to be fair, his criticisms of this type of bourgeois art ain’t exactly wrong. Many of those “respected” novels really are unreadable if you’re not a nineteenth-century bourgeois . He criticizes the most respected art of the time for willful obscurity, vagueness, sensationalism, unnecessary details, and the tendency to imitate what came before. He recognizes that much of this work was intentionally inaccessible to the great bulk of common people and was intended to reward the pseudo-intellectualism of a select few. He sees it as artificial, intellectualized, and insincere. And there are more than a few “blue chip artists” of whom we could say the same today. His key point- when art becomes a profession, it tends to become insincere- is still hard to refute.

But, like most moral scourges, Tolstoy wants to shock us out of our complacency, and some of his picks seem intended to provoke. He loves A Tale of Two Cities and Les Misérables, Chopin and Mozart, which are all fair choices; and then he also praises a popular children’s story about a chicken, while pretty much condemning- ahem– Ibsen, Shakespeare, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, and most of his own work. I mean, come on, man!

But, strangely enough, I’m not sure I disagree with how Tolstoy defines art, which he calls:

“that human activity which consists in one man consciously conveying to others, by external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.

Don’t we say, of bad art, that it “just didn’t move me”? I might differ about what constitutes good art, but then I’m not a Christian anarchist. Good art, in Tolstoy’s “true Christianity” transmits feelings of universal love of men and God, which is probably where I differ, but ultimately I do agree about the appeal of art:

It is this liberation of the person from his isolation from others, from his loneliness, the merging of the person from others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and properties of art.

We create so as to convey something of our internal life that would otherwise go unexpressed. Art makes us feel our inner life has not been passed over in silence.

Not coincidentally, the other day, while I was working in a bakery/café on Tompkins Square Park, I got to talking about art and music with the older Japanese baker who works in the back. I asked him what draws him to certain types of “art.” Not unlike Tolstoy, he answered the question this way:

“It’s hard to describe, but for me, art has to be sincere. I don’t like it when they’re trying to say something that seems fake or affected. What moves me is sincerity. They’re expressing something authentic. They have to mean it.”

Appropriately enough, we were talking about Laura Nyro.

And so, brothers and sisters, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, or trying to express through art this weekend?