What is Art

What Is Art?

It would be very easy to simply regurgitate Leo Tolstoy's words here, many of his views on art mirror those of The Rantonteur. One of the observations most commonly attributed to Tolstoy is that "to explain a work of art is to confess that it has failed as art". Whether or not those are his exact words, the sentiment captures much of his philosophy. He wrote "What is Art" in the latter years of the 19th Century, during what is known as The Silver Age - a cultural explosion not unlike the earlier Italian Renaissance period, where art, music and philosophy collided. This age of creative freedom came directly before the Russian Revolution, and subsequent Soviet repression - and we all know what that looked like. The parallel could be drawn that we are entrenched within a repression of our own making, where the freedom of expression is dogmatically policed in favour of ideological conformity and, ultimately, homogenised stupidity.

There are already too many words surrounding Art, not least those written by critics. I don't intentionally deride critics as humans, but in their profession as intermediaries between the artist and the audience, the true essence of art has been lost to the viewer. Humans are lost enough as it is, without then viewing everything through the veil of another's opinion. Perhaps this enforced reliance on the words of others to formulate our own opinions is, in part, a wider mechanism designed to disassociate humans from creativity itself - popular opinion weaponised to crush the creative spirit.

"The business of the critic is to educate the public to appreciate works of art. But if art is that activity by which one man transmits his feelings to another, what is there to teach?" - Tolstoy. By all means, allow another human to draw your attention to the work of an artist, but never let them then tell you what to feel about that work - feelings are entirely subjective, so to outsource to a third party for interpretation is to disconnect from ourselves.

Perhaps the elitism of the art world has been compounded by this intermediary process? To call upon another great writer's cautionary tale; Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes, feels like an observation of modern society - with the masses too afraid to draw attention to themselves by calling out the bullshit. It takes a child in their untainted fearlessness and untouched by societal performance, to say something about the Emperor being naked... Next time you go to an exhibition, take a child and ask them what they are feeling. Children approach art with a freedom that adults have gradually surrendered. They have not yet learnt which paintings they are supposed to admire, or which emotions they are expected to report. Their response is immediate rather than rehearsed.

In writing this, I now consider my own education as an Art Historian, digging through the archives of the art world and layering my own interpretations on to the pieces that I encountered there. My own emotional responses were marked as worthy - or not - by someone who was , in turn, repeating what they themselves had inherited. And who decided that particular writer's opinion was, above all others, the one to be favoured and taught? If only I had spent a little longer in the jazz club next-door, rather than in the lecture halls, I would've learned to feel art far sooner.

Tolstoy believed that art exists in the feelings transmitted between one person and another. It is a principle that quietly underpins The Rantonteur's work. The paintings are never shown in their entirety online, not out of mystery for mystery's sake, but because a digital image cannot carry the same weight as standing before the canvas itself. Scale, texture, energy and physical presence disappear on a screen. What remains is only a record of the painting, not the encounter with it.

To stand before a painting and discover what it awakens within you - without instruction, without explanation, without permission - is perhaps the closest we come to experiencing art as it was always intended.