What is Art? What is Good Art?

Let us ask, what is art?

We have seen in the recent newspapers about the photographer bagging the “UOB Painting of the Year” prize, which consist of a series of photographs of animal parts, which led to a dispute amongst the public community between good and bad art, and that most common people claimed that the series was bad art just because it was mortifying.

So if something is ugly and/or morbid, even for music, is it art? So what really is art?

Perhaps the 19th century Russian writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy has defined it best. Let me extract a few points from his essay, ‘What is Art?’ (1896) Before you try to argue against it, read it and try to understand and absorb these points of view; these may very well help all of us in creating better music because after all, music is art too! Let us try to read…yes it’s long but take your time to read and digest…

-“Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what really art is has been lost.”

-“In order to correctly 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.”

-“The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s feeling expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example: one man laughs, and another who hears it becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow…By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others.”

-“However, if a man infects another or others indirectly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering – that does not amount to art.”

-“The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most various – very strong or very weak, very important or insignificant, very bad or very good; feelings of love for one’s own country, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humour evoked by a funny story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful arabesque – it is all art.”

-“Only if the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.”

-“The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter i.e. not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.”

-“A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist – not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.”

-“The presence in various degrees of three conditions – individuality, clearness, and sincerity – decides the merit of a work of art as art. Sincerity is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from our upper class art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal claims of covetousness or vanity.”

-“Thus is art divided from that which is not art, and thus is the quality of art as art decided, independently of its subject matter, i.e. apart from whether the feelings it transmits are good or bad.”

You, the band member need not agree with all these points; nevertheless it is good to use these extracted points as a means to a perfection of your own art: making music as an individual and as a band. :D