What Is Art?

Written after the crisis that turned Tolstoy against his own great novels, this is a deliberately hostile book — hostile to the inherited idea that art is about beauty and disinterested pleasure. Tolstoy proposes something plainer: art is whatever infects another person with a feeling the artist has actually lived. By that standard he judges a painting or symphony by how widely and sincerely it transmits real emotion, a test severe enough to sweep aside Shakespeare, Wagner, and his own earlier fiction as ornate but insincere.

The argument still unsettles, because it refuses to let art hide behind expertise or prestige. If art’s whole point is transmitting feeling between people, a generated image raises Tolstoy’s question at its sharpest: infection requires someone actually felt something first. Whether a system without feelings can meet that bar is the argument this book hands to every later theory of art, Danto’s included.