The Great Charnel Houses in the Cloud

I want to follow up with some suggestions about conquering the Uninterrupted Prose Syndrome, by making verbiage "breathe" with some kind of pictorial illustration, gotten somewhere. (Let's ignore the fact that music might be even better for this purpose, since it's probably more technically difficult to get it into the blog post.) 

So off I will go, searching for shareable photographs in the great charnel houses for internet photographs, such as publicDomainPictures.net, Picasa, or Flickr. Blogs that have a Creative Commons License, such as a commenter's blog, are also worth a serious look.

Oops. There is a likely problem that we must address before rolling up our sleeves. Recall the controversy that good ol' Leo Tolstoy got into in the Colorado arts scene, one summer not so long ago. (grin) By invoking his arguments on "What is Art?" (free on Google Books), I am not trying to con you with an "appeal to Authority," as it might appear at first. A "big name's" theory is not necessarily correct. But can we agree that his is at least worth considering, before making up your own mind?

In short, Tolstoy thought the conventional world of Art was barking up the wrong tree in pursuing Beauty or the Pleasure to be gotten from viewing Beauty. Tolstoy thought that Beauty is just the pompous, but empty, term we use to describe whatever is de mode amongst the smart-set.

He finally answers the question in Chapter 5:

...that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.

And it is on this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling, and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

Now, I'm not going to use this as an excuse not to go looking for paintings and photographs that I can borrow to help my own blog posts breathe; but much of the art world only cares about Beauty, which in the final analysis, is nothing more than what sells to a bourgeois matron looking to fill empty spaces in her McMansion's living room.

Where can I find a world of illustration that isn't concerned about beauty, but can be used to transfer the emotional content of the thoughts being expressed, per Tolstoy? I'll bet it's the world of cartoons! (Such as they used to put in Barron's or The New Yorker.) Nobody can accuse them of being pretty, since they are just crude line drawings of poor verisimilitude. 

Consider an example. Last post I complained of the tedium of reading uninterrupted prose. Think of how much of human life through the ages has been captured by that one word, 'tedium.' So are artists too busy to bother with something so fundamentally important to the human condition? But just try to imagine a photograph or painting that expresses Tedium. Even if an artist were clever enough to think of one, they wouldn't do it because it wouldn't be beautiful enough. (That ugly word, again.)  Perhaps music could do a better job. Consider Eric Satie's Gnossiennes #1. (I am extremely grateful to a long-lost commenter who once suggested I look into Satie.)

But I can remember a couple cartoons from 20 years ago (!) that expressed tedium/futility in a way that knocked me off my feet.

Aw gee, now I have another internet search project: to find a (shareable) charnel house for cartoons in the cloud.