The New Criterion
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- The Times Literary Supplement
FeaturesDecember 1998 Tolstoy's prophecy: “What is art?” today On Tolstoy's curmudgeonly book on art & morality As the nineteenth century was packing its bags in early 1898, Leo Tolstoy published the most outlandish book ever written on one of that century’s favorite subjects: art. Approaching his seventieth birthday, Tolstoy distilled in What Is Art? the moralistic bile that had been rising in him for two decades and spewed it over virtually the entire artistic culture of his century—and of modern times. He spared almost nothing, including his own great works. For he had come to believe most of it exemplified “false art,” perpetrating a variety of social evils and depriving Western civilization of the necessary virtues of true art. “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement,” he cried, bent on awakening modernity from its complacency; “art is a great matter.” Eccentric and lucid, cranky and brilliant, funny and fierce, What Is Art? resounds with the effusions of a moral conv ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 December 1998, on page 15 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Tolstoy-s-prophecy---ldquo-What-is-art-rdquo--today-2956
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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