Art as Communication of Feeling

Clinton Bronder

Subject: Art as Communication of Feeling

Class reading: The Nature of art: Chapter 8

March 30^th, 2011

In The Nature of Art, we are presented with Leo N. Tolstoy’s view on arts ability to convey feeling. He divides verbal communication and art by categorizing what they convey. Whereas verbal communication conveys a thought or experience that the speaker once had, art conveys a feeling the artist once had. Art’s ability to do this is due to the simple fact that art is a from of communication, utilized to communicate different things that other forms of communication. Is it art then if someone is able to identify the emotion involved with an occasion as it is happening? Tolstoy says “Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communication to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain signs.” (Wartenberg, 107). Tolstoy defines express a feeling one once had as art. This answers my question then. The occasion where the emotion took place must have already ended before you can imitate it again and consider it art. A harder question to answer is, if a man is experiencing a new emotion, provoked by something in that instance, and tosses paint on a canvas in a way he feels expresses this emotion is it considered art if the canvas is reviewed on a future occasion? It doesn’t involve the calling up a past emotion like Tolstoy mentions yet this art will survive even after the artist’s emotion that provoked it dies.