Art for the Sake for Society and Beauty - Essay Example

Tolstoy stressed the emotional importance pivots on the value of communication as "infection". This aesthetic conception led Tolstoy to widen the criteria of what art exactly is. Good art, he claims foster feelings of universal brotherhood. Bad art inhibits such feelings. Tolstoy believes that it is unfitting of people in his society to continue to embrace the Greek tradition of art. He was also of the opinion that the most important quality of art is sincerity and he claims that professionalism causes a sense of sincerity in the artist as art which is produced for a living is more likely to be false and disingenuous.

Oscar Wilde blames the public for this. He says that the art should never try to make it popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. The insistence of public to exercise its authority on art is immoral and the fault lies in the up bringing. Tolstoy's view of art mirrors the very idiosyncratic and sovereign nature of his own interpretation of Christianity. He was of the view that a good art must be religious art. He also claims that criticism or interpretation of art is irrelevant and superfluous.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man under Socialism also shares the same view on professionalism of art. He says, an individual who has to make things for the use of others and with reference to their wants and wishes does not work with interest and thus cannot put his best into his work. Upon the other hand, when a community or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate the artist what he should do, then art either wholly dies out, or becomes stereotyped or degenerates into a low and dishonorable appearance of art.

Wilde too supports the view by regarding art as a matter of demand and supply. Tolstoy says, "A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want." The moment art is made on demand and personal choice of the audiences; the artist looses the claim to be called an artist and is merely a craftsman and a tradesman. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world had known.

The artist is the only one who can fashion a beautiful thing and he does not do it for his own pleasure than he is not an artist at all. Art on order, as per Wilde, is aggressive, offensive and brutalizing. The art that has escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. (Oscar Wilde, The Soul of a Man Under Socialism)According to Tolstoy, art cannot be defined as an activity that produces beauty. Beauty cannot be defined objectively, and hence cannot be used as a criterion to define what art is and what it is not.

The aim of art is not merely to produce beauty or to provide pleasure and enjoyment. He wished that art should be served as a means of communication and as a means of expression of experience. Like speech, art also serves as a means of union by transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, the peculiarity of art being that whereas words transfer thoughts and ideas, art transfers feelings. Art develops a certain kind of relationship between the emitter who has produced it or is producing it and with all those who subsequently, simultaneously or