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What Is Art?

By Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy challenges beauty, pleasure and expert taste as foundations for defining art. He argues that art communicates feeling by bringing artist and audience into a shared experience, then asks how sincerity, accessibility and moral purpose distinguish valuable art from cultural counterfeits.

Translator or editor
Aylmer Maude
Publication
1898 (completed 1897; source edition 1904)
Genre
Aesthetics; philosophy of art; moral and social philosophy
Era
19th-Century Philosophy, Modern Philosophy

About this work

Completed in 1897 and first issued in English in 1898, What Is Art? is Leo Tolstoy's radical examination of artistic value, cultural authority and moral responsibility. Rejecting the idea that art is defined by beauty, pleasure, technical accomplishment or elite approval, Tolstoy describes it as a human activity through which one person consciously communicates a feeling to others. The book develops this account through the concept of "infection": successful art enables its audience to participate in the feeling expressed. Tolstoy distinguishes the force of artistic communication - shaped by individuality, clarity and sincerity - from the moral value of what is communicated. He criticises professionalised and exclusive art, the authority of critics and academies, and cultural institutions sustained by social inequality. Severe, provocative and deliberately revisionary, What Is Art? raises enduring questions about accessibility, artistic expertise, public cost, popular culture and the relationship between aesthetic and ethical judgement. This edition uses Aylmer Maude's public-domain translation and preserves the historical introduction, authorial preface, twenty chapters and four appendices.

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