Count Tolstoy Versus the Colorado Arts Scene

Artists, artists everywhere! From the northern Rio Grande Valley, Sante Fe, Taos, Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, and into Colorado, the whole region is infested with artists. I'm even squatting on the driveway providing driveway security services at the home of a couple Colorado artists. You'd think that art was a major part of the economy. Since when did Americans become so arts-oriented?

If a traveler takes travel seriously -- that is, if travel is more than trivial sightseeing and generating digital postcards -- he needs to ask: what is this place good for? What is special about it? Then he needs to do some thinking about a topic that the location brings up.

I reread Tolstoy's What is Art? (*) Before showing some juicy quotes from that book, let's first try to imagine an elderly Tolstoy -- with his beard and earnestness, now an ex-novelist, working to reform Christianity, and totally outside the intellectual mainstream of Europe -- walking through an art festival in summer in Colorado. I'll bet he would be scowling the entire way. You don't have to sympathize with the Prophet Tolstoy's views to believe that his ideas about art are worth listening to. From Chapter 2:

But the ordinary man either does not know, or does not wish to know, all this, and is firmly convinced that all questions about art may be simply and clearly solved by acknowledging beauty to be the subject-matter of art. To him it seems clear and comprehensible that art consists in manifesting beauty, and that a reference to beauty will serve to explain all questions about art.

But what is this beauty which forms the subject-matter of art? How is it defined? What is it?

It is taken for granted that what is meant by the word beauty is known and understood by every one. And yet not only is this not known, but, after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject...the question, What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved, and in each new work on aesthetics it is answered in a new way.

From Chapter 4:

Instead of giving a definition of true art, and then deciding what is and what is not good art by judging whether a book does or does not conform to the definition, a certain class of works, which for some reason pleases a certain circle of people, is accepted as being art, and a definition of art is designed to cover all these productions.

No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes in society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them;

So the theory of art, founded on beauty, expounded by aesthetics, and in dim outline professed by the public, is nothing but the setting up as good of that which pleases us, i.e., pleases a certain class of people.

People who consider the aim of art to be pleasure cannot realize its true meaning and purpose, because they attribute to an activity, the meaning of which lies in its connections with other phenomena in life, the false and exceptional aim of pleasure.

Therefore, however strange it may seem, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

The chapters that I condensed are concerned about What Isn't Art?, rather than what is, which was in later chapters.

(*) I wasn't able to find a text file version of this on the internet, but only the Google books version