Month: March 2020

Tolstoy sees art as a means of emotional communication. He believes it 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.” The idea of “infectiousness” is useful in understanding this concept of art because when multiple people experience the same work of art they are all infected with the feelings of its creator, and thus share an additional emotional connection with each other through their infection. To Tolstoy, the quality of art (not considering its subject matter) is based on how effectively it accomplishes this goal of emotional infection. This effectiveness is derived from the originality of the emotion being expressed, the manner in which it is conveyed, and the sincerity and intensity with which the art’s creator feels it.

Based on these criteria, Tolstoy contends that the viewer can judge whether something is art by seeing if they “experience a mental condition which unites [them] with [the artist] and with other people who also partake of that work of art.” He argues that this condition is inherently obvious and unmistakable (if the viewer’s sense of art has not been “atrophied,” at least), though it is not clear how this is possible when the viewer does not know for certain what the artist’s feeling in creating the work was, and thus cannot be sure whether they are being emotionally united. Irregardless, Tolstoy advocates using this distinguishing method to seek out and promote art that fits his definition and reject “counterfeit” art which focuses merely on producing pleasure rather than on emotional communication.

Tolstoy’s understanding of art is a compelling and valuable one, but it is incomplete. He is quite correct about the importance of conveying emotion and thus creating empathy and connection through art, and his method of evaluation is a useful first step in deciding whether to classify something as art and a productive method of artistic analysis. However, art can actually have value beyond its efficacy in evoking the artist’s feelings in the viewer, and Tolstoy’s definition of art is too narrow. For instance, there is a movie called The Room which by all indications was created with the purpose of seriously expressing feelings about the pain caused by love, the fickle nature of the world, and other such profound topics. It fails spectacularly at this task, and is widely considered one of the worst films ever made, but in the process it is extremely funny and can evoke quite strongly in the viewer emotions which were entirely unintended by its creator. The fact that this emotional experience is not shared by the artist does not make it any less valuable, or the work that evoked it any less a work of art. Tolstoy’s infectiousness is an important component of art, but it falls short in cases such as this one and is not a complete encapsulation of the myriad varieties of art produced by humans.

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If a time traveler with highly questionable priorities decided to use their temporal power to show the rather mediocre sci-fi film eXistenZ to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, he would likely be too flabbergasted by the very existence of video playback technology to offer any particularly coherent commentary on how the movie fit into his hierarchical model of reality. However, once he recovered from this shock, Plato would probably express even harsher contempt for eXistenZ and the games it depicts than he voiced about the paintings and poems of his native era.

To consider the film first, Plato would see works of art like eXistenZ as further removed from the truth and more damaging to to society than the media with which he was familiar. While they may not exactly reflect the nuances of politics or warfare, Homer’s epics at least make some effort to depict events that the audience can believe might really have happened. By contrast, eXistenZ has no apparent compunctions about portraying fantastical scenarios and technologies with no regard to if or how they might be remotely possible. In Plato’s eyes, this is even worse than shoddy imitation, it is intentional distortion. This deception is exacerbated by the fact that a movie with special effects is much more beguiling and seemingly real than a mere recited poem or engraved drawing, increasing the risk that people will have strong emotional reactions to it and confuse it with reality. In Plato’s ideal society, movies would be completely banned.

VR games like transCendenZ would fare no better under Plato’s system. He would view them as the ultimate incarnation of artistic trickery, deceiving their audience so effectively that they are virtually indistinguishable from the physical world. Depicting such a game within another work of art, and including several more meta-layers of virtual reality within the game, would seem to Plato merely to be adding more and more steps between the reality of the forms and the artistic experience. Such a work is so far removed from the truth that no useful insight can possibly be conveyed through it, and so in Plato’s eyes it is worse than useless.

(After further consideration, I must revise my earlier, disparaging opinion of the hypothetical time traveler’s priorities and conclude that the consternation evoked by showing Plato science fiction movies would be highly entertaining, and this activity will henceforth hold a cherished place on my time travel bucket list.)

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