Tolstoy has a thought or two.
Increasingly I am coming to agree with him. Art is a way of connecting people through a common experience, through the participation in an event that elicits a specific emotional response. The better the art, the more lasting the impression.
I can't decide if I agree with him that the virtues of "high art" are negated by the fact that it isn't accessible to everyone. True, you need to know something about the art and the context in which it was produced to appreciate most of this type of art, but the profound statements (occasionally) made in the upper echelons of art-making cannot be simply ignored. An audience cannot be expected to be equally educated on all matters or else art would consist only of expressions of our most basic instincts, which don't tend to be particularly beautiful most of the time.
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Tolstoy defines art as "[evoking] in oneself a feeling one has once experienced" and transmitting it so that "others experience the same feeling." I think this is a failure from the get-go. A characteristic of much great art is precisely that the audience is divided in their emotional reaction to it. Does Shostakovich's Fifth end happily or tragically? Is the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh a scherzo, a funeral march, or a pastorale? Are we supposed to believe the governess's story in The Turn of the Screw, or not? Is the viewer of a Gothic cathedral intended to focus on the hideous gargoyles outside, or the beautiful chancel inside? In fact, I can think of very few works of art that elicit the same emotions in every observer.
The other problem, neatly summarized by Hindemith, is this: if art is supposed to transmit an emotion, whose emotion is it? Certainly not the artist's, who has other things to worry about. Mozart didn't sit at his writing desk weeping while he was composing the Requiem; he was trying to finish the piece in a hurry. If the piece has emotional content, it has nothing to do with the author's feelings, but reflects the idiosyncratic experience of the individual listener.
The classical conception of aesthetics (dismissed by Tolstoy as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo) states that objects have aesthetic value because they participate in a universal ideal of beauty. After the Enlightenment this ideal began to give way to a more humanist conception based on the transmission of emotions - but, as I've briefly sketched above, the "transmission of emotions" is an aesthetic dead end. The reason for the problem, I think, is that people misinterpret the true meaning of the classical conception of beauty. To say that the beauty of a flower, or a painting, or a symphony, is an instantiation of a universal ideal of beauty does not imply that our approach to it should be emotionless, Apollonian contemplation. Indeed, the power of a beautiful object - any beautiful object - is that it will bring forth a variety of emotional responses, which will reflect both the intrinsic qualities of the object and the contingent emotional experiences of the viewer.
Posting on aesthetics is dangerous, Dave - if you keep it up I may never get any work done. . . !
I humbly thank you for your reproach. I concur and retract my previous blasphemy.
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