What is Art? and the Problem of Our Culture

To many, modern culture is a disaster. Looking at America today, some people perceive the arts (which shall henceforth be referred to as “art”) to be empty and meaningless.

Of course, most of this is something of an overreaction. There are plenty of enjoyable books still being written, plenty of fun songs still sung, and plenty of interesting works of art still created. Yet it also seems evident that, in comparison to the culture of olden days, ours is one which desperately needs to reach a new understanding of art.

Enter Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?, a seminal and controversial work of aesthetic philosophy which decries as insufficient the works of such masters as Shakespeare and Franz Liszt. In writing the work, Tolstoy was reacting to a growing notion in aesthetics of “art as the manifestation of beauty, and of beauty as that which pleases.” In other words, more and more philosophers were pursuing an understanding of art that was subjective to the reactions of the viewers.

Tolstoy’s solution in his text is to radically redefine art as “a means of communication among people,” by which one could enter “into a certain kind of communion with the one who produced or is producing the art.” To Tolstoy, then, art is not just good but essential. It is a requirement that all people produce or experience it.

Tolstoy’s definition ultimately runs into a few problems. Firstly, while it may objectively define art, it provides no grounds for saying which works of art are better or worse than others. He holds that the best works of art are those which have a universal effect, lambasting works that, in his opinion, could only be understood by a select few people, or even none whatsoever. However, he fails to justify his dismissal of the idea that perhaps some people truly fail to understand a work of art, and need to be taught how to experience it. 

Secondly, consider how Tolstoy rejects definitions based on beauty. He considers all such definitions to be subjective because of those who define beauty as “that which pleases.” However, if one redefines beauty based on an objective standard, then Tolstoy’s rejection of such a definition becomes altogether unwarranted. For instance, one could posit that temporal beauty is a reflection of divine beauty, and since a standard of beauty rooted in the divine is objective by reason of God’s immutability, this definition of beauty could be a part of a definition of art.

What one discovers, then, is that a blended definition of art is needed: one which combines the universally communicative idea of Tolstoy’s with the objective standard of reflecting divine beauty. While a greater amount of analysis than is possible on this page is necessary to fully parse through these ideas, suffice it to say that for now, we may define art as the communication or expression of that part of the human soul which is made in the beautiful imago Dei.

If art, then, is defined as such, we begin to see why it is so crucial to humanity. It is not merely a means of communication, but it is one which, more than perhaps any other, can bring us nearer to the presence of God. 

Not only is that so, but the art need not be explicitly religious to do so. For instance, the French impressionist painter Claude Monet renounced his Catholic faith and became an atheist, but the beauty of his paintings is still capable of demonstrating the presence of God’s true beauty in our world and in the soul of the painter himself.

Apply this to our current cultural situation. Since we as a culture have lost our religious fervor, and no longer see one another as made in the image and likeness of God, our art reflects this emptiness. Not only is it lacking in true beauty, which can only come from God, but it lacks a moral sense, since this, too, can only be rooted in the divine. 

As a result, we see the emergence of two lesser forms of art: atheistic art, by which I mean art that does communicate something from the artist to the receiver, but something which can only be described as meaninglessness; and what I will term “fun art,” or art which induces positive biological reactions and is therefore quite enjoyable, but which ultimately fails to bring us any closer to God.