Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Was ist Kunst?
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love a strong argument they can push against, and anyone who has wondered why art matters or who gets to decide.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
What Is Art? is a long essay in book form by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist. He worked on it for years and published it in 1897, after Anna Karenina and War and Peace were behind him. By then he had turned away from his early fame and wanted to judge everything by Christian moral standards. Art was no exception, and he asked a plain question that many thinkers had made far too complicated.
The book starts with an uneasy scene. Tolstoy watches an opera rehearsal and sees how much labor, money and human effort goes into it. He wonders what could justify all of that. To answer, he reviews the leading European theories of beauty, finds them empty, and offers a definition of his own. Art, he says, is the passing of feeling from one person to another. The rest of the book follows from that idea, including some harsh verdicts on Wagner, Beethoven and the French poets of his day, and on his own novels.
You get here the book's whole argument, in nine steps. You will hear why Tolstoy rejects beauty as the test, what he means by infection, and how he tells real art from imitation. You will also hear why he thinks art belongs to everyone and not to a refined few. Let us begin with the cost that troubled him.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Art costs a great deal, so ask whyFree
- 2Beauty cannot be the test of art
- 3Pleasure is also a poor definition
- 4Art passes feeling from one person to another
- 5Good art is individual, clear and sincere
- 6The best art serves the religious sense of its age
- 7Counterfeit art imitates the real thing
- 8Art split into the few and the many
- 9The book has been fiercely challenged and still lasts
Punkt 1 von 9
Art costs a great deal, so ask why
Tolstoy opens with a visit to a rehearsal, where he sees workers, singers and directors toiling over a new opera. The scene looks strange to him. Grown men are shouting at one another over small details, while stagehands labor in dust and bad air. He asks what all of this is for, and whether the answer is good enough to justify the price.
He widens the picture. Theatres, orchestras, painting schools, publishers and critics all take huge sums from society. Many of those who pay are poor peasants and workers who never see the results. Tolstoy argues that something this costly needs a clear purpose. If we cannot say what art is, we cannot say whether the sacrifice is fair.
He is shocked that when he asks serious people what art is, they answer with the word beauty and then stop. They talk as if the question were settled. He finds that no two writers agree about what beauty is, and that the whole field of aesthetics is a tangle of vague terms. Learned books pile up, yet no one can say plainly what the thing is.
This matters, he says, because the cost is paid in lives. He thinks of the artists too, who give up ordinary work and are trained from childhood for one narrow skill. Meanwhile the public is told to admire what it does not understand, and to feel ashamed if it does not.
For a modern reader the point still has force. We fund museums, festivals and schools of art, and we rarely ask what they are for. Tolstoy forces the question. You may reject his answer, but his starting point is fair. Whatever we value should be able to explain itself to the people who pay for it.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 81,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 5 h 25 min
- Listening time9 h
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 14 other languages