On Creating Meaningful Art

must overcome to strive toward the good. Second, beauty is the enemy of the common people. He explains why:

Refined art could emerge only on the slavery of the popular masses and can continue only as long as this slavery exists; and that the specialists—writers, musicians, dancers and actors—can reach that refined degree of perfection only on condition of the hard work of labourors, and that only on these conditions can there exist the refined public to appreciate such works. Free the slaves of capital, and it will be impossible to produce such refined art. 32

As mentioned previously, Tolstoy saw an inequitable segregation of the wealthy upper class from the common working people as being at the heart of an aesthetic where beauty is the manifestation of art. Nearly twenty years before the Bolshevik revolution, Tolstoy was seeking to democratize art by ridding it of beauty. Obviously there are too many implications in this aspect of his aesthetic to track down, but suffice it to say that democratization always seeks the lowest common denominator of that which is being democratized. Art, especially, is not excluded from this curse. An abbreviated summary of Tolstoy’s aesthetic argument would go something like this. True art is not meant to be a manifestation of beauty because beauty is nothing more than a euphemism of the upper class for selfish pleasure. From the time of the Renaissance to the time of the Reformation, the upper class Europeans, having left their faith in the Church’s teaching (and not turning to the true teachings of Christianity as it is supposed), pursued their artistic pleasures on the backs of the common people under the guise of manifesting the beautiful. This separation of the upper class’s refined art from the arts of the common people resulted in an injustice against the common people; a specialized, refined art that was not really art, competed to replace the real art that would lead mankind forward toward the common good. Of this, Tolstoy writes, “And the consequence of this absence of true art has proved to be the very one it had to be: the depravity of the class that avails itself of this art.”33 Therefore, to believe Tolstoy, artists should not strive to create beautiful art lest they continue to contribute to the degradation of society. In a single sleight of the pen, Tolstoy has reduced art to meaning any creative work that communicates one’s feelings to another without the presence of beauty. All that is left now is to dislodge meaning from art, or at least change its fundamental characteristics, and then the ordinary, vulgar, and profane can be included to fit the definition of fine art.

Tolstoy was not alone in the proletarian effort to democratize art, and rob it of transcendent beauty. John Dewey, recall, similarly followed this line of thinking when he reduced art to any experience that possessed mere aesthetic pleasure. Dewey opined, “It is customary, and from some points of view necessary, to make a distinction between fine art and useful or technological art. But the point of view from which it is necessary is one that is extrinsic to the work of art itself. The customary distinction is based