Where Does Anti-Aestheticist Feeling Come From?
Leo Tolstoy's thoughts on art give us an insight into the moral feelings underpinning the centuries-old conflict over beauty
When Leo Tolstoy was going through a crisis of meaning and a spiritual journey, he immersed himself in the teachings of Christ. He began to adopt pacifism and asceticism, leading a lifestyle of simplicity and manual labor, and advocating for a return to agrarian communal living. He criticized organized religion as a corruption, leading to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Throughout this moral and spiritual journey, he was also thinking about the meaning of art.
His book What Is Art? was the product of fifteen years of deep reflection on the subject. He criticizes the Russian and European leisure classes, who spent all their unearned wealth on luxurious art and extravagant productions, which required punishing levels of skill and flamboyant ornamentation. He characterizes the art world's values at the time as those of the Renaissance and, therefore, also Greco-Roman. He morally condemns the idleness of the cultured rich and their high art, made deliberately inaccessible to the common man who works the fields and creates society's wealth.
He goes through a history of aesthetic philosophy from Baumgarten to Kant. After considering all of their attempts to explain what beauty is, what art is, and why they are “good,” he concludes that it is primarily a pointless endeavor because:
“No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them.”
From there, he argues that from the time of the Renaissance, the elites of Europe were alienated from true Christianity, embodied in the ascetic egalitarian Christianity of Francis of Assisi, because its values were incompatible with their selfish, idle and luxurious lifestyles. True Christianity would have undermined the basis for their wealth and privilege, he says, so they became more interested in Greco-Roman paganism, which revered strength and beauty. They wanted art to please themselves, and they declared this to be the best art.
He argues that the great art of every age is an authentic expression of the religious feeling of the age, so he compliments the epic storytelling of the ancient world alongside sagas, folk tales, and world religious texts like the story of Genesis. His reasoning here is that it was an authentic expression of its age, but it was nonetheless a morally backward time to him, full of slavery and cruelty. He believed that human history is the unfolding of moral progress and that the telos of all this moral progress is the universal love and unity of all mankind. Therefore, art's highest purpose should be to move us closer to that end by transmitting universally comprehensible human feeling.
Art based on the enjoyment of beauty created a limited range of feelings, he complains, the expression of idleness, full of love affairs, adoration of the strong, sexual desire, sensuality, nakedness, erotic mania, lack of belief in anything, subject matter impoverished by idle cosseted lives, decadence, and shutting out the common man. They delighted in Nietzsche and Wagner because they felt flattered by the “cult of the superior man.”
He condemns brain-spun counterfeit art for people who wish to show their breeding and writes that it only develops cruelty within them. Instead, he champions the values of Realism in literature and visual art. He cites Dickens and the French painter Jean-François Millet.
A modern audience is likely to observe the ornamental beauty of the Cathedrals next to the plain functionality of modernism and come to associate beauty with religion and ugliness with secularism. Reading Tolstoy reminds us instead of the long conflict within Christianity and the centuries-old clash in aesthetic and moral values between Hellenism, its Renaissance revival (beauty for pleasure), and what he considers true Christianity (humility and moral progress toward the unity of all mankind). He even cites John Wycliffe, the 14th-century English Christian critic of the luxury and lavish decoration of the Roman Church, and John Calvin, who promoted the idea that church spaces should be devoid of decoration and art.
In her book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey describes Christian attacks on the Serapeum in Alexandria, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the statues in the Parthenon. In Renaissance Florence, a rebirth of the classical world, the “Bonfire of the vanities” was a moral backlash against the values of the elites, their luxurious sinful lifestyle, and the amoral secular culture they promoted, led by the fiery friar Savoranola.
The period of Byzantine Iconoclasm saw more controversy over iconographic art. In the 16th-century Iconoclastic Fury or the Beeldenstorm, in the Low Countries, Protestant mobs destroyed images, altars, and symbols, defacing statues and shattering stained glass windows, slashing and burning paintings.
We can see this reflected in the egalitarian values of the Quaker meeting houses, devoid of ornamentation, with an emphasis on clean lines and functional design, and then in the anti-ornamentation philosophy of the Bauhaus and the “form follows function” philosophy of modern design. We see the desire to create a universal human art in the International Style, which emerged from the modernist movements in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Across world history, attacks on beauty have been inspired by regime changes, ethnic conflicts, war, and, perhaps most often, religious or ideological purification to topple and replace a moral value system.
What aesthetic values of Hellenism live on today? Oscar Wilde attempted a modern justification of leisure and beauty for pleasure, but where machines would replace the moral wrong of slavery. He famously defended amoral “art for art’s sake.”
The last unapologetically luxurious and boastfully beautiful monumental style championed by elites in the West was Art Deco, which had its International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts about a century ago (1925).
We live in a time of anti-aestheticism, in which the anxious and tense zeitgeist is more conducive to icon-smashing than indulgence in art for art’s sake. Our elites are focused on technological competition, not beauty. There is no reason for an age of beauty to necessarily come again. In her book, Catherine Nixey notes that ponderous and stoic values were weak compared to the moral power of the early Christian fanatics. The Hellenes had the values to create beauty but not to defend it against a moral revolution from below. We may say we want to return to a golden age of beauty, but we have yet to figure out how to resolve this moral war, even in our own minds.
(It amused me that, as I was writing, YouTube recommended this:)
I remember Art Deco, from the old neighborhood. He used to hang out with Al Fresco. I think he married Gloria Mundi ... or was it Dona Ferentes?
Very interesting concluding point about the anti-aestheticism of our contemporary elites. Goes to show that, no matter how salient they may have been at the time, one cannot simply copy/paste critiques like Tolstoy's directly on to contemporary conditions.