Blog Question # 2 for Wednesday

In 1896, the Russian Novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote an article entitled "What is Art," in which he makes assertions about the state of art, our relationship to it, and forms different moments if inquiry to challenge responses. Look at the excerpts below and answer the questions I've posed, in bold:

1. "In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man."

Do you agree with this? Is art a condition of our lives or can it be a form of pleasure? Is art a way of bringing people together or do you view it as a distant and larger entity?


#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

Explain the relationship you have with a piece of art and/or an artist? Do you know a lot about this artist, have their biography on your table, all their albums, their fragrances, their clothing, etc.? How does this relationship support the art and enhance your feelings toward the product or producer of art?


#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.

Write a letter to an artists you currently admire without applauding their art. For instance, I might want to write a letter to Beyonce explaining what has happened to me since I started listening to her, or I might want to ask Thom Yorke about the space of music in his non-music day, or I might want to write to a dead painter talking about the absence of certain colors in their work.