Then imagine that silence broken with the first lines of the symphony played, loud ly, by a full orchestra.īeethoven wrote this on his copy of the music, as he wrote it: Fate knocks. Imagine sitting in a silent concert hall. For example, you’ve certainly heard the opening lines of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Art, in the hands of a master, can capture that moment, preserve it, and deliver it to people yet unborn. Imagine, for example, a very special time and place – the kind that occurs for only for a few seconds, and only once in a generation. Th is transmission of feelings can be a valuable thing. A good painting, for example, can give you the sense of being in a certain place at a certain time, or it can give you the feeling of what it was like, or would be like, to be in that situation. And by implication, the communication of something worthwhile. We can begin our examination with a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? :Īrt is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.īy words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.Īrt, then, is a means of communication. What, after all, is the point of a painting that provides no coherent image? And why would people consider a signed urinal great art? (Yes, that’s a real example.) Making it still harder has been an obsession with incoherent and confusing art over the past century … something that Salvador Dali once called, “the cult of strange.”Īnd so most of us have had a hard time coming to grips with art. But art is an odd thing, in that people generally creat e it for internal (and thus hard-to-articulate) reasons, making clear, logical explanations difficult. As far back as we can see in any detail, we find humans creating art.
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