art is essay

Essays About Art: Top 5 Examples and 9 Prompts

Essays about art inspire beauty and creativity; see our top essay picks and prompts to aid you.

Art is an umbrella term for various activities that use human imagination and talents. 

The products from these activities incite powerful feelings as artists convey their ideas, expertise, and experience through art. Examples of art include painting, sculpture, photography, literature, installations, dance, and music.

Art is also a significant part of human history. We learn a lot from the arts regarding what living in a period is like, what events influenced the elements in the artwork, and what led to art’s progress to today.

To help you create an excellent essay about art, we prepared five examples that you can look at:

1. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin

2. what is art by writer faith, 3. my art taught me… by christine nishiyama, 4. animals and art by ron padgett, 5. the value of art by anonymous on arthistoryproject.com, 1. art that i won’t forget, 2. unconventional arts, 3. art: past and present, 4. my life as an artist, 5. art histories of different cultures, 6. comparing two art pieces, 7. create a reflection essay on a work of art, 8. conduct a visual analysis of an artwork, 9. art period or artist history.

“But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class, and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education–education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world…”

Nochlin goes in-depth to point out women’s part in art history. She focuses on unjust opportunities presented to women compared to their male peers, labeling it the “Woman Problem.” This problem demands a reinterpretation of the situation’s nature and the need for radical change. She persuades women to see themselves as equal subjects deserving of comparable achievements men receive.

Throughout her essay, she delves into the institutional barriers that prevented women from reaching the heights of famous male art icons.

“Art is the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects that can be shared with others. It involves the arranging of elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions and acts as a means of communication with the viewer as it represents the thoughts of the artist.”

The author defines art as a medium to connect with others and an action. She focuses on Jamaican art and the feelings it invokes. She introduces Osmond Watson, whose philosophy includes uplifting the masses and making people aware of their beauty – he explains one of his works, “Peace and Love.” 

“But I’ve felt this way before, especially with my art. And my experience with artmaking has taught me how to get through periods of struggle. My art has taught me to accept where I am today… My art has taught me that whatever marks I make on the page are good enough… My art has taught me that the way through struggle is to acknowledge, accept and share my struggle.”

Nishiyama starts her essay by describing how writing makes her feel. She feels pressured to create something “great” after her maternity leave, causing her to struggle. She says she pens essays to process her experiences as an artist and human, learning alongside the reader. She ends her piece by acknowledging her feelings and using her art to accept them.

“I was saying that sometimes I feel sorry for wild animals, out there in the dark, looking for something to eat while in fear of being eaten. And they have no ballet companies or art museums. Animals of course are not aware of their lack of cultural activities, and therefore do not regret their absence.”

Padgett recounts telling his wife how he thinks it’s unfortunate for animals not to have cultural activities, therefore, can’t appreciate art. He shares the genetic mapping of humans being 99% chimpanzees and is curious about the 1% that makes him human and lets him treasure art. His essay piques readers’ minds, making them interested in how art elevates human life through summoning admiration from lines and colors.

“One of the first questions raised when talking about art is simple — why should we care? Art, especially in the contemporary era, is easy to dismiss as a selfish pastime for people who have too much time on their hands. Creating art doesn’t cure disease, build roads, or feed the poor.”

Because art can easily be dismissed as a pastime, the author lists why it’s precious. It includes exercising creativity, materials used, historical connection, and religious value. 

Check out our best essay checkers to ensure you have a top-notch essay.

9 Prompts on Essays About Art

After knowing more about art, below are easy prompts you can use for your art essay:

Is there an art piece that caught your attention because of its origin? First, talk about it and briefly summarize its backstory in your essay. Then, explain why it’s something that made an impact on you. For example, you can write about the Mona Lisa and her mysterious smile – or is she smiling? You can also put theories on what could have happened while Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

Rather than focusing on mainstream arts like ballet and painting, focus your essay on unconventional art or something that defies usual pieces, such as avant-garde art. Then, share what you think of this type of art and measure it against other mediums.

How did art change over the centuries? Explain the differences between ancient and modern art and include the factors that resulted in these changes.

Are you an artist? Share your creative process and objectives if you draw, sing, dance, etc. How do you plan to be better at your craft? What is your ultimate goal?

To do this prompt, pick two countries or cultures with contrasting art styles. A great example is Chinese versus European arts. Center your essay on a category, such as landscape paintings. Tell your readers the different elements these cultures consider. What is the basis of their art? What influences their art during that specific period?

Like the previous prompt, write an essay about similar pieces, such as books, folktales, or paintings. You can also compare original and remake versions of movies, broadway musicals, etc.

Pick a piece you want to know more about, then share what you learned through your essay. What did the art make you feel? If you followed creating art, like pottery, write about the step-by-step process, from clay to glazing.

Visual analysis is a way to understand art centered around what the eyes can process. It includes elements like texture, color, line, and scale. For this prompt, find a painting or statue and describe what you see in your essay.

Since art is a broad topic, you can narrow your research by choosing only the most significant moments in art history. For instance, if you pick English art, you can divide each art period by century or by a king’s ruling time. You can also select an artist and discuss their pieces, their art’s backstory, and how it relates to their life at the time.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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What is Art? Why is Art Important?

What is art? – The dictionary definition of art says that it is “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination , especially in the production of aesthetic objects” (Merriam-Webster). Art is essential to society as it stimulates creativity , reflects culture, fosters empathy, provokes thought, and offers a medium for expression. It enhances society’s intellectual and emotional understanding of the world.

But the thing about art is that it’s so diverse that there are as many ways to understand it as there are people.

That’s why there are scholars who give their special definition of the word, such as the one penned by this famous Russian novelist, which goes:

“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others” – Leo Tolstoy

During his life, Tolstoy was known to write based on his life experiences, such as his most famous work, “War and Peace,” which used much of his experience during the Crimean War.

Whether or not his definition of art is the best, the point is that people look at art based on how they have experienced it.

What is Art?

There are many common definitions of art as per many books by famous artists and authors . Few to quote:

• any creative work of a human being
• a form of expressing oneself
• resides in the quality of doing; the process is not magic
• an act of making something visually entertaining
• an activity that manifests beauty ( What is Beauty in Art? )
• the mastery, an ideal way of doing things
• not a thing — it is a way (Elbert Hubbard)
• the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known
• discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use (Frank Lloyd Wright)

Why is Art Important?

Probably, the most prominent theory which best explains – Why is art important – is from Van Jones, which subtly provides a great response to What is art?

Van Jones presented a graph that accurately represents the interaction between the four aspects of society and its different members.

Consequently, Vones depicts why art is important to our society.

The graph (below) represents our society.

Society is driven by the powerful elites, the dependent masses, the government, cultural producers, and artists

On the left, you have action, and on the right, ideas; elites are at the top, and the masses are below. There’s an inside act and an outside act.

On the inside, there’s big money: elites are spending millions of dollars to influence politicians and policymakers. The inside act has the power to influence policy creators.

On the outside, we at the grassroots set our expectations and needs so that the elected candidates pass laws that give us power. Masses reflect what society wants (heart)

The left side, “action,” often means quantifiable policy changes. The right side, “ideas,” can be harder to see. We are not necessarily talking about concrete things here, but rather, a “headspace.”

Academic institutions and think tanks, which are not always involved in the immediate policy wins, are significant in creating a culture of thought

While the left side, “action,” continues to produce quantifiable policy changes and new laws, the right side, “ïdeas,” can be hard to quantify its outcome. Although “head” talks about theories and academics, it fails to contribute significantly to policymakers.

Artists come into the play here at this moment

Artists are represented here on the side of ideas, in the “heart space.”

Art is uniquely positioned to move people—inspiring us, inciting new questions, and provoking curiosity, excitement, and outrage.

Artists can strengthen the will and push people to act. They do not think like policymakers or academics people.

Artists think from their heart – big, revolutionary, and visionary ideas.

This is why artists are able to move people to action, thus creates a significant cultural and political contributions.

This is what makes art powerful.

Impact of Art on Politics, Culture, and People

Art is essential in society because it is an essential ingredient in empowering people’s hearts.

When activists show images of children suffering from poverty or oppression in their campaigns, this is the art of pulling the heartstrings of society’s elite and powerful to make changes.

Similarly, when photographers publish photos of war-torn areas, it catches the attention of the masses whose hearts reach out to those who need help.

When an artist creates great music and movies, it entertains people worldwide. This is art, making a difference in society.

A very modern example of art in action is street art. When the famous Italian street artist Blu created the mural in Kreuzberg , it sparked a lot of solid and different reactions rooted deeply in the differences between East and West Berlin.

Who would have thought that a wall painting depicting two masked figures trying to unmask each other could elicit such strong reactions?

Now, the issue behind this mural is a different matter to discuss. But whether or not the effect of the mural was good, it cannot be denied how a well-crafted piece of art can have a significant impact on society.

Art is also a remarkable mode of depicting culture from all over the world

When you see a Zen garden in Sydney or San Francisco, you know that it’s a practice that originated from China.

Likewise, when you see paper swans swarming a beautiful wedding ceremony, you know that this is origami, an art from Japan.

When you see films featuring Bollywood music and dancing, you know that it’s a movie from India. Art can take cultural practices from their origins and transport and integrate them into different parts of the world without losing their identity.

There, these art forms can entertain, create awareness, and even inspire foreigners to accept these cultures, no matter how strange or alien they may seem.

And that’s precisely what John Dewey implies in Art as an Experience:

“Barriers are dissolved; limiting prejudices melt away when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian Art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude.”

This is especially important in our highly globalized world.

Art has played an essential role in helping fight against intolerance of different cultures, racism, and other forms of unjust societal segregation.

With immigration becoming a trend, the world’s countries are expected to be more tolerant and accepting of those who enter their borders.

Art helps make that happen by making sure that identities and their cultures are given due recognition around the world.

Art stimulates creativity and innovation.

Art inspires creativity and innovation beyond boundaries, encouraging imagination, lateral thinking, and risk-taking. The process of creating art involves experimentation and novel ideas, which can influence progress in various industries.

Art also challenges perceptions and assumptions, encouraging critical thinking and open-mindedness, which are essential for innovation. By presenting alternative realities or questioning the status quo, art inspires individuals to think differently and to approach problems from unique angles.

Furthermore, the aesthetic experience of art can lead to epiphanies and insights.

The beauty or emotional impact of a piece of art can trigger ideas and spark the imagination in ways that logical reasoning alone may not. This can lead to breakthroughs in creative and scientific endeavors, as individuals draw inspiration from the emotions evoked by art.

Art plays a subtle yet significant role in our daily lives.

For instance, when a child takes part in a school art project, they are given a variety of materials to create a collage. As they construct a 3D model of an imaginary winged vehicle with multiple wheels, the textures and shapes inspire them. This hands-on exploration of materials and forms sparks the child’s interest in engineering and design, planting the seeds for future innovation.

The above example illustrates how art can engage young minds, encouraging them to think creatively and envision innovative solutions beyond conventional boundaries.

In essence, art fuels the creative fire, providing the sparks that can ignite the next wave of innovation in society.

Great Art elicits powerful sentiments and tells meaningful stories

Art can take the form of film, music, theatre, and pop culture , all of which aim to entertain and make people happy. But when films, songs, or plays are made for a specific audience or purpose, the art begins to diversify.

Films, for example, can be made to spread awareness or cultural appreciation. Songs can also be composed in a way that brings out certain emotions, give inspiration, or boost the morale of people.

During the Victorian period in England, women started to make a name for themselves with classic artworks such as Elizabeth Sirani’s “ Portia Wounding Her Thigh ”, a painting that signifies the message that a woman is now willing to distance herself from gender biasedness.

The painting’s subject depicts an act of a woman possessing the same strength as that of a man. “Portia” represents surrender because she isn’t the same type of woman known in society as weak and prone to gossip.

One of the revolutionary works in history that ultimately opened the doors of art to women in general showed the power of women in art

There are also works of art that illicit intellectual solid discourse – the kind that can question norms and change the behavior of society.

Sometimes, still, art is there to reach out to a person who shares the same thoughts, feelings, and experiences as the artist.

The truth is that art is more than just a practice – it is a way of life. Art is more than just a skill – it is a passion. Art is more than just an image – each one tells a story.

The fact that art is quite connected to human experience makes it unsurprising that we have always made it part of our ways of living.

This is why ancient and present-day indigenous groups from all over the world have a knack for mixing art and their traditional artifacts or rituals without them knowing, which in fact one of the fundamental reasons why art is essential.

Why is Art so Powerful?  Why is art important to human society?

Perhaps the most straightforward answer to this question is that art touches us emotionally.

Art is influential because it can potentially influence our culture, politics, and even the economy. When we see a powerful work of art, we feel it touching deep within our core, giving us the power to make real-life changes.

In the words of Leo Tolstoy:

“The activity of art is based on the capacity of people to infect others with their own emotions and to be infected by the emotions of others. Strong emotions, weak emotions, important emotions or irrelevant emotions, good emotions or bad emotions – if they contaminate the reader, the spectator, or the listener – it attains the function of art.”

In sum, art can be considered powerful because of the following reasons, among others:

• It has the power to educate people about almost anything. It can create awareness and present information in a way that could be absorbed by many quickly. In a world where some don’t even have access to good education, art makes education an even greater equalizer of society.
• It promotes cultural appreciation among a generation that’s currently preoccupied with their technology. It can be said that if it weren’t for art, our history, culture, and traditions would be in more danger of being forgotten than they already are.
• It breaks cultural, social, and economic barriers . While art can’t solve poverty or promote social justice alone, it can be a leveled playing field for discourse and expression. The reason why everyone can relate to art is that everyone has emotions and personal experiences. Therefore, anyone can learn to appreciate art regardless of social background, economic standing, or political affiliation.
• It accesses higher orders of thinking . Art doesn’t just make you absorb information. Instead, it makes you think about current ideas and inspire you to make your own. This is why creativity is a form of intelligence – it is a unique ability that unlocks the potential of the human mind. Studies have shown that exposure to art can improve you in other fields of knowledge.

The truth is that people have recognized how influential art can be.

Many times in history, I have heard of people being criticized, threatened, censored, and even killed because of their artwork.

Those responsible for these reactions, whether a belligerent government or a dissident group, take these measures against artists, knowing how much their works can affect the politics in a given area.

In the hands of good people, however, art can be used to give back hope or instill courage in a society that’s undergoing a lot of hardships.

Art is a powerful form of therapy .

Some say art is boring . But the fact remains that art has the power to take cultural practices from where they are from and then transport and integrate them into different parts of the world without losing their identity.

Art helps make that happen by making sure that identities and their cultures are given due recognition around the world. Thus, it is essential to reflect upon – Why art is critical – which, in fact, provides you the answer to – What is art?

This is why we at The Artist believe that art is a form of creative human expression, a way of enriching the human experience.

NFTs: The Future of Art

Now, the world of art is shifting towards a digital and alternative world. And NFT is becoming a game-changing variable in the future of art .

What is NFT artwork?

An NFT , which stands for “non-fungible token” can be defined as a digital file that can be simply and easily transferred across a blockchain network.

Many people around the world are seeking out these digital assets to sell and trade in their everyday market trading, since these items are able to be traced, have value and oftentimes also have considerable rarity for collectors.

While artistic works are certainly a part of the NFT market, a variety of different players are getting involved through gaming systems, avatars, and even entire virtual worlds.

Such tokens have a wide variety of usage and while for many these are out of reach, for serious investors NFTs can prove to be a profitable source of income.

Art plays a significant role in society by acting as an educational equalizer, fostering cultural appreciation, bridging cultural and social divides, and stimulating higher orders of thinking and creativity.

Art and its definition will always be controversial.

There will always be debates about what art is and what is not.

But no matter what the definition may be, it has been around us for as long as humans have existed (i.e. cave paintings, hieroglyphics).

Whether or not we are aware of it, we allow art to affect our lives one way or another, and the reasons why we make art are many!

We use the arts for our entertainment, cultural appreciation, aesthetics, personal improvement, and even social change. We use the arts to thrive in this world.

So, share your thoughts – What does art mean to you? Art plays a subtle yet significant role in our daily lives. For instance, when a child takes part in a school art project, they are given a variety of materials to create a collage. As they construct a 3D model of an imaginary winged vehicle with multiple wheels, the textures and shapes inspire them. This hands-on exploration of materials and forms sparks the child’s interest in engineering and design, planting the seeds for future innovation. This example illustrates how art can engage young minds, encouraging them to think creatively and envision innovative solutions beyond conventional boundaries.

Passionate experimenter with a heart for art, design, and tech. A relentless explorer of the culture, creative and innovative realms.

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Art Is Life. Life Is Art.

Iranian-Dutch artist Sevdaliza on the ultimate power of art, even in fragile times.

Photography by Tré Koch/Early Morning Riot

Back in Janaury, around the release of "Oh My God," we were planning an op-ed by Iranian-Dutch artist Sevdaliza on her indentity and multi-dimensionality: she is a refugee, international businesswoman, creative director, artist, freedom fighter, CEO. That idea evolved into this piece, which couldn't be more timely as artists around the world are experiencing new creative and financial challenges.

To all artists,

Art is life, no matter how fragile the times.

Art is a testimony of the human condition. It encompasses all of our hardships, emotions, questions, decisions, perceptions. Love, hatred, life, death. Essentially the way in which we perceive our world, every aspect of humanity can be expressed through art.

These times lay bare why art can’t be dictated nor contained by anything. Creativity isn’t limited by its resources. Creation is a primal source. The authenticity in a painting or a piece of music is felt universally, because it resonates with the same essential being in the creator and the creation. The artist is often referred to as a magician, whereas her art only lays bare the heightened capacity to channel the universal truths.

The common story of life, love and death is what connects us humans.  Art is important because it functions as a holistic portal to a deeper understanding of humans and the self.

Photo by Zahra Reijs

Traditions, beliefs, values and lifestyle all shine forth through what we produce as art, whether we know it or not. Architecture, fashion, music, film, dance, paintings, prayers.  They all essentially reveal the culture of people.

Art allows us to discover and preserves the delighted mind. While creation lays bare our human fragility. The distance between our most actualized self (creation) and it’s lesser materialization (art) is a vast universe between facts and metaphors. Perhaps this is why we create and materialize art, despite the arising feeling that everything has already been said and done. 

We as a species, cannot simply conceive our lives out of art. We struggle daily to close that gap, although we feel that it might be an impossible task. Art will always be metaphorical, but ultimately, it does not matter. And that exact fact for me, is beautiful, cruel and simple.

Art does not subdue to any kind of utility or desire. Creation only aims at its own existence.

We are all artists some way, somehow. We fight our battles, love and hate, ask our questions, and of course, read the universe in our own unique way.  Art is not a wrong nor right, it is not a distraction, nor a privilege.  It is life itself. 

I hope we understand why art is life and why life is art. Why we should always strive to allow art, to stimulate art, to support art. St(art) today.

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“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

In his essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, defines art as a way to communicate emotion with the ultimate goal of uniting humanity.

How can we define art? What is authentic art and what is good art? Leo Tolstoy answered these questions in “What is Art?” (1897), his most comprehensive essay on the theory of art. Tolstoy’s theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other’s feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind’s collective well-being. 

Furthermore, Tolstoy firmly denies that pleasure is art’s sole purpose. Instead, he supports a moral-based art able to appeal to everyone and not just the privileged few. Although he takes a clear stance in favor of Christianity as a valid foundation for morality, his definition of religious perception is flexible. As a result, it is possible to easily replace it with all sorts of different ideological schemes.

Personally, I do not approach Tolstoy’s theory as a set of laws for understanding art. More than anything, “What is art?” is a piece of art itself. A work about the meaning of art and a fertile foundation on which truly beautiful ideas can flourish.

Most of the paintings used for this article were drawn by realist painter Ilya Repin. The Russian painter created a series of portraits of Tolstoy, which were exhibited together at the 2019 exhibition “Repin: The Myth of Tolstoy” at the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy. More information regarding the relationship between Tolstoy and Repin can be found in this article . 

Who was Tolstoy?

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Leo Tolstoy ( Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) was born in 1828 in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 200km from Moscow. His family belonged in the Russian aristocracy and thus Leo inherited the title of count. In 1851 he joined the tsarist army to pay off his accumulated debt but quickly regretted this decision. Eventually, he left the army right after the end of the Crimean War in 1856. 

After traveling Europe and witnessing the suffering and cruelty of the world, Tolstoy was transformed. From a privileged aristocrat, he became a Christian anarchist arguing against the State and propagating non-violence. This was the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and was expressed as non-resistance to evil. This means that evil cannot be fought with evil means and one should neither accept nor resist it.  

Tolstoy’s writing made him famous around the world and he is justly considered among the four giants of Russian Literature next to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev. His most famous novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). However, he also wrote multiple philosophical and theological texts as well as theatrical plays and short stories. Upon completing his masterpiece Anna Karenina , Tolstoy fell into a state of insufferable existential despair.

Charmed by the faith of the common people, he turned to Christianity. Eventually, he dismissed the Russian Church and every other Church as corrupted and looked for his own answers. His theological explorations led to the formulation of his own version of Christianity, which deeply influenced his social vision.  He died in 1910 at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

Art Based On Beauty And Taste 

Tolstoy wrote “What is art?” in 1897. There, he laid down his opinions on several art-related issues. Throughout this essay , he remains confident that he is the first to provide an exact definition for art:

“…however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”  

So, what is art for Tolstoy? Before answering the question, the Russian novelist seeks a proper basis for his definition. Examining works of other philosophers and artists, he notices that they usually assume that beauty is art’s foundation. For them beauty is either that which provides a certain kind of pleasure or that which is perfect according to objective, universal laws.

Tolstoy thinks that both cases lead to subjective definitions of beauty and in turn to subjective definitions of art. Those who realize the impossibility of objectively defining beauty, turn to a study of taste asking why a thing pleases. Again, Tolstoy sees no point in this, as taste is also subjective. There is no way of explaining why one thing pleases someone but displeases someone else, he concludes. 

Theories that Justify the Canon

Theories of art based on beauty or taste inescapably include only that type of art that appeals to certain people:

“First acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us) and then framing such a theory of art that all those productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it.”

These theories are made to justify the existing art canon which covers anything from Greek art to Shakespeare and Beethoven. In reality, the canon is nothing more than the artworks appreciated by the upper classes. To justify new productions that please the elites, new theories that expand and reaffirm the canon are constantly created: 

“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; just as if there had never been periods in history when certain special circles of people recognized and approved false, deformed, and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been utterly forgotten.”  

The true definition of art, according to Tolstoy, should be based on moral principles. Before anything, we need to question if a work of art is moral. If it is moral, then it is good art. If it is not moral, it is bad. This rationale leads Tolstoy to a very bizarre idea. At one point in his essay, he states that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and his own War and Peace are immoral and therefore bad art. But what does Tolstoy exactly mean when he says that something is good or bad art? And what is the nature of the morality he uses for his artistic judgments?

What is Art?

Art is a means of communicating feelings the same way words transmit thoughts. In art, someone transmits a feeling and “infects” others with what he/she feels. Tolstoy encapsulates his definition of art in the following passages:

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hand on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

In its essence, art is a means of union among men brought together by commonly experienced feelings. It facilitates access to the psychology of others fostering empathy and understanding by tearing down the walls of the Subject. This function of art is not only useful but also necessary for the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

The innumerable feelings experienced by humans both in past and present are available to us only through art. The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. “Men would be like beasts”, says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Tolstoy’s definition expands to almost every aspect of human activity way beyond the fine arts. Even a boy telling the story of how he met a wolf can be art. That is, however, only if the boy succeeds in making the listeners feel the fear and anguish of the encounter. Works of art are everywhere, according to this view. Cradlesong, jest, mimicry, house ornamentation, dress and utensils, even triumphal processions are all works of art. 

This is, in my view, the strongest point of Tolstoy’s theory. Namely, that it considers almost the totality of human activity as art. However, there is a distinction between this expanded art, and art in the limited sense of the word. The latter corresponds to the fine arts and is the area that Tolstoy investigates further in his essay.  A weak point of the theory is that it never examines the act of creation and art that is not shared with others. 

Real and Counterfeit Art

The distinction between real and counterfeit, good and bad art is Tolstoy’s contribution to the field of art criticism. Despite its many weaknesses, this system offers an interesting alternative to judging and appreciating art.

Tolstoy names real art (i.e. authentic, true to itself) the one resulting from an honest, internal need for expression. The product of this internal urge becomes a real work of art, if it successfully evokes feelings to other people. In this process, the receiver of the artistic impression becomes so united with the artist’s experience, that he/she feels like the artwork is his/her own. Therefore, real art removes the barrier between Subject and Object, and between receiver and sender of an artistic impression. In addition, it removes the barrier between the receivers who experience unity through a common feeling.

“In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” Furthermore, a work that does not evoke feelings and spiritual union with others is counterfeit art. No matter how poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting it is, it must meet these conditions to succeed. Otherwise it is just a counterfeit posing as real art.  

Emotional Infectiousness

Emotional infectiousness is a necessary quality of a work of art. The degree of infectiousness is not always the same but varies according to three conditions:

• The individuality of the feeling transmitted: the more specific to a person the feeling, the more successful the artwork.
• The clearness of the feeling transmitted: the clearness of expression assists the transition of feelings and increases the pleasure derived from art.
• The sincerity of the artist: the force with which the artist feels the emotion he/she transmits through his/her art. 

Out of all three, sincerity is the most important. Without it, the other two conditions cannot exist. Worth noting is that Tolstoy finds sincerity almost always present in “peasant art” but almost always absent in “upper-class art”. If a work lacks even one of the three qualities, it is counterfeit art. In contrast, it is real if it possesses all three. In that case, it only remains to judge whether this real artwork is good or bad, more or less successful. The success of an artwork is based firstly on the degree of its infectiousness. The more infectious the artwork, the better.  

The Religious Perception of Art

Tolstoy believes that art is a means of progress towards perfection. With time, art evolves rendering accessible the experience of humanity for humanity’s sake. This is a process of moral realization and results in society becoming kinder and more compassionate. A genuinely good artwork ought to make accessible these good feelings that move humanity closer to its moral completion. Within this framework, a good work of art must also be moral. 

But how can we judge what feelings are morally good? Tolstoy’s answer lies in what he calls “the religious perception of the age”. This is defined as the understanding of the meaning of life as conceived by a group of people. This understanding is the moral compass of a society and always points towards certain values. For Tolstoy, the religious perception of his time is found in Christianity. As a result, all good art must carry the foundational message of this religion understood as brotherhood among all people. This union of man aiming at his collective well-being, argues Tolstoy, must be revered as the highest value of all. 

Although it relates to religion, religious perception is not the same with religious cult. In fact, the definition of religious perception is so wide, that it describes ideology in general. To this interpretation leads Tolstoy’s view that, even if a society recognizes no religion, it always has a religious morality. This can be compared with the direction of a flowing river:

If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.

It is safe to say that more than a century after Tolstoy’s death, “What is Art?” retains its appeal. We should not easily dismiss the idea that (good) art communicates feelings and promotes unity through universal understanding. This is especially the case in our time where many question art’s importance and see it as a source of confusion and division. 

• Tolstoy, L.N. 1902. What is Art? In the Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoy . translated by Aline Delano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 328-527. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43409
• Jahn, G.R. 1975. ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 34, No. 1. pp. 59-65. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/428645
• Morson, G.S. 2019. ‘Leo Tolstoy’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy

Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

By Antonis Chaliakopoulos MSc Museum Studies, BA History & Archaeology Antonis is an archaeologist with a passion for museums and heritage and a keen interest in aesthetics and the reception of classical art. He holds an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow and a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (NKUA) where he is currently working on his PhD.

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Defining ‘Art’

For a practice that has followed humanity since the dawn of consciousness, the question ‘What is Art?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. The Oxford English Dictionary, typically an authority when it comes to definition, calls art “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

When asked to ‘think of an artwork’ there’s a pretty good chance that Oxford’s definition covers what you imagined. Oxford’s definition establishes some crucial distinctions: art is created by humans, so a beautiful tree is not art unless a human has applied their creativity to it, as with a bonsai tree. Also, art may be appreciated for its beauty or emotional power. While many artworks are visually pleasing, ugly or disturbing work is valid, and can be appreciated for its emotional power. So if Oxford has the definition nailed, why have generations of aestheticians, philosophers, writers, artists and academics defined and redefined what they think art is? First, some examples. We’ll begin with the pragmatic. In 1957, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: “Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.” Another practical definition comes to us from Charles Eames: “Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.”

For many artists and writers art is an intensely personal and difficult act, with Oscar Wilde calling art a mode of individualism , the French writer André Gide saying it’s “the point where resistance is overcome” and Italian film director Federico Fellini called art “autobiography . “

For Leo Tolstoy art was something greater than the individual. In his essay What is Art he wrote: “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” And this is the crux of why art is difficult to define. The Oxford English defines art as an object created with intention, but generations of artists have seen art as many things. And they are all correct, because art is as complicated, diverse and contentious as human nature. No one definition will ever properly encapsulate what art is. So here, in no particular order are Obelisk’s definitions of art:

— Art is a process — Art is communication — Art is an expression of humanness

Reed Enger, "Defining ‘Art’," in Obelisk Art History , Published August 15, 2019; last modified October 12, 2022, http://www.arthistoryproject.com/essays/defining-art/.

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THE big ideas: Why Does Art Matter?

Art Is How We Justify Our Existence

Our technologies are tools. But our creative works carry the wisdom of the world.

By David Zwirner

Mr. Zwirner is an art dealer.

This is the essay is part of The Big Ideas , a special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone , in which more than a dozen artists, writers and thinkers answer the question, “Why does art matter?” The entire series can be found here .

When I agreed to write this essay, little did I know that when I finally sat down to tackle it all my favorite museums would be closed to the public, along with every library, theater, concert hall and movie house and, of course, the galleries I own. It’s a bit like our world faded abruptly and unexpectedly from vivid color to black and white.

But it dawned on me that there could hardly be a better moment to reflect upon the importance of art — or, better still, culture itself — than in the face of its almost complete physical absence.

This total loss of actual, palpable experiences with art is like a kind of withdrawal for me. The experience and appreciation — the need — for culture feels like it’s hard-wired into my existence and, I’d like to believe, hard-wired into our species. Art is not something that happens at the periphery of our lives. It’s actually the thing that’s right there in the center, a veritable engine.

It’s like my mother once said: “Die Kunst ist unsere Daseinsberechtigung.” Art is how we justify our existence.

We’ve been creating art for much longer than recorded history. The earliest surviving visual art, as in the cave paintings of Sulawesi in Indonesia and El Castillo in Spain, date back to roughly 40,000 years ago. I have to assume there’s earlier work that we don’t yet know about. Our great rivals in the evolutionary race, the Neanderthals, were stronger, bigger and had larger skulls than us, but left behind no sophisticated tools and very little in the way of artifacts. One argument holds that the Neanderthal imagination was limited, and that Homo sapiens’ more complex and adventurous way of thinking — our creativity — is what moved us to the forefront among the human species.

For me, art is not just sensory stimulation. I believe it’s most gratifying as an intellectual pursuit. Great art is, by definition, complex, and it expects work from us when we engage with it. There is this wonderful moment, one that I have missed so much lately, when you stand before a work of art and, suddenly, the work is speaking back to you. Great works carry with them so many messages and meanings. And often those messages survive for centuries. Or — even more mysteriously — they change as the years and decades pass, leaving their power and import somehow undiminished.

Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” comes to mind, as does the intense pleasure I’ve experienced every time I’ve seen it, at different stages of my life, at the Prado museum in Madrid. Thinking about “Las Meninas” today, amid the new reality of a pandemic, reminds me how much I look forward to seeing works of art in their physical spaces again. There is no substitute for the artwork’s materiality, which ultimately and invariably relates to our senses, our bodies and our analytical prowess and intellectual curiosity.

The appreciation of art is, more often than not, a communal experience. It brings us together — when we go to museums, to openings, to concerts, to movies or to the ballet or theater. And we argue, and sometimes we fight, but we certainly don’t wage war over artistic expression. I would contend that art and culture are the most important vehicles by which we come to understand one another. They make us curious about that which is different or unfamiliar, and ultimately allow us to accept it, even embrace it. Isn’t it telling that those societies most afraid of “the other” — the Nazis, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Chinese under Mao — were not able to bring forth any significant cultural artifacts? Yet an abundance of work created in resistance to such ideologies can still dominate our cultural discourse.

Lately, a discussion has raged about how art and culture stack up against the hard sciences. More ominously, the question is weighing on the colleges and universities of the United States, where the humanities are playing an ever smaller role. That’s a dangerous proposition. While the sciences have brought into this world so many wonderful things, they are also implicated when it comes to our most sinister achievements — nuclear warfare, genetic manipulation and the degradation of nature.

While art can reach into the darkest places of the human psyche, it does so to help us understand and hopefully transcend. Art lifts us up. In the end, I think its mission is simply to make us better people.

The machines have proven to be absolutely amazing during a pandemic, connecting us, informing us and entertaining us, but in the end they are limited. They’re born of science and they have no imaginations. We have to imagine for them.

Who knows what the future will bring? If we Homo sapiens are challenged again, it will not be by the Neanderthal — nor by any other species — but by the machines we invented ourselves. Winning that battle can’t be done without firing up the most important engines we possess — culture and creativity — because reason is born out of our cultural experiences. Works of art carry with them the wisdom of the world.

This difficult period we have been in recently will pass, and the exchanges I’ve had with visual artists have given me some of my most hopeful moments. I’ve reached many in their studios, while they were working. They certainly seemed happy to hear from me, and our conversations have been perfectly polite; still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was interrupting them. They had more important things to do than talk to me. They were making art.

I can’t wait to see what they’ve been working on. I promise I will show it to you as soon as I can.

David Zwirner is an art dealer with galleries in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.

Now in print : “ Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments ,” and “ The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments ,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

ARTS - Herzberg: Writing Essays About Art

• Art History
• Current Artists and Events
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• Video and Image Resources
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What is a Compare and Contrast Essay?

What is a compare / contrast essay.

In Art History and Appreciation, contrast / compare essays allow us to examine the features of two or more artworks.

• Comparison -- points out similarities in the two artworks
• Contrast -- points out the differences in the two artworks

Why would you want to write this type of essay?

• To inform your reader about characteristics of each art piece.
• To show a relationship between different works of art.
• To give your reader an insight into the process of artistic invention.
• Use your assignment sheet from your class to find specific characteristics that your professor wants you to compare.

How is Writing a Compare / Contrast Essay in Art History Different from Other Subjects?

You should use art vocabulary to describe your subjects..

• Find art terms in your textbook or an art glossary or dictionary

You should have an image of the works you are writing about in front of you while you are writing your essay.

• The images should be of  high enough quality that you can see the small details of the works. 
• You will use them when describing visual details of each art work.

Works of art are highly influenced by the culture, historical time period and movement in which they were created.

• You should gather information about these BEFORE you start writing your essay.

If you describe a characteristic of one piece of art, you must describe how the OTHER piece of art treats that characteristic.

Example:  You are comparing a Greek amphora with a sculpture from the Tang Dynasty in China.

If you point out that the color palette of the amphora is limited to black, white and red, you must also write about the colors used in the horse sculpture.

Organizing Your Essay

Thesis statement.

The thesis for a comparison/contrast essay will present the subjects under consideration and indicate whether the focus will be on their similarities, on their differences, or both.

Thesis example using the amphora and horse sculpture -- Differences:

While they are both made from clay, the Greek amphora and the Tang Dynasty horse served completely different functions in their respective cultures.

Thesis example -- Similarities:

Ancient Greek and Tang Dynasty ceramics have more in common than most people realize.

Thesis example -- Both:

The Greek amphora and the Tang Dynasty horse were used in different ways in different parts of the world, but they have similarities that may  not be apparent to the casual viewer.

Visualizing a Compare & Contrast Essay: 

Introduction (1-2 paragraphs) .

• Creates interest in your essay
• Introduces the two art works that you will be comparing.
• States your thesis, which mentions the art works you are considering and may indicate whether the focus will be on similarities, differences, or both. 

Body paragraphs 

• Make and explain a point about the first subject and then about the second subject 
• Example: While both superheroes fight crime, their motivation is vastly different. Superman is an idealist, who fights for justice …… while Batman is out for vengeance. 

Conclusion (1-2 paragraphs) 

• Provides a satisfying finish 
• Leaves your reader with a strong final impression. 

Downloadable Essay Guide

• How to Write a Compare and Contrast Essay in Art History Downloadable version of the description on this LibGuide.

Questions to Ask Yourself After You Have Finished Your Essay

• Are all the important points of comparison or contrast included and explained in enough detail?
• Have you addressed all points that your professor specified in your assignment?
• Do you use transitions to connect your arguments so that your essay flows into a coherent whole, rather than just a random collection of statements?
• Do your arguments support your thesis statement?

Art Terminology

• British National Gallery: Art Glossary Includes entries on artists, art movements, techniques, etc.

Lee College Writing Center

Writing Center tutors can help you with any writing assignment for any class from the time you receive the assignment instructions until you turn it in, including:

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Contact a tutor:

• Phone: 281-425-6534
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Other Compare / Contrast Writing Resources

• Southwestern University Guide for Writing About Art This easy to follow guide explains the basic of writing an art history paper.
• Purdue Online Writing Center: writing essays in art history Describes how to write an art history Compare and Contrast paper.
• Stanford University: a brief guide to writing in art history See page 24 of this document for an explanation of how to write a compare and contrast essay in art history.
• Duke University: writing about paintings Downloadable handout provides an overview of areas you should cover when you write about paintings, including a list of questions your essay should answer.
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Is it OK to make art?

If you express your creativity while other people go hungry, you’re probably not making the world a better place.

by Rhys Southan   + BIO

With less than a week to finish my screenplay for the last round of a big screenwriting competition, I stepped on a train with two members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism. Holly Morgan was the managing director for The Life You Can Save, an organisation that encourages privileged Westerners to help reduce global poverty. Sam Hilton had organised the London pub meet-up where I’d first heard about the movement (known as ‘EA’ for short; its members are EAs). The pair of them were heading to East Devon with a few others for a cottage retreat, where they were going to relax among sheep and alpacas, visit a ruined abbey, and get some altruism-related writing done. I decided to join them because I liked the idea of finishing my script (a very dark comedy) in the idyllic English countryside, and because I wanted to learn more about the EA goal of doing as much good as you possibly can with your life. We were already halfway there when my second reason for going threatened to undermine my first.

Around Basingstoke, I asked Hilton what EAs thought about using art to improve the world. In the back of my mind I had my own screenplay, and possibly also Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Oscar acceptance speech for best director, which I’d once found inspiring:

I want to thank anyone who spends a part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think this world would be unlivable without art.

It turns out that this is not a speech that would have resonated with many Effective Altruists. The idea that someone’s book, film, painting, or dance could be their way to reduce the world’s suffering struck Hilton as bizarre, almost to the point of incoherence. As I watched his furrowing brow struggle to make sense of my question, I started to doubt whether this retreat was an appropriate venue for my screenwriting ambitions after all.

In 1972, the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer published an essay called ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, which contained the following thought experiment. Suppose you saw a child drowning in a pond: would you jump in and rescue her, even if you hadn’t pushed her in? Even if it meant ruining your clothes? It would be highly controversial to say ‘no’ – and yet most of us manage to ignore those dying of poverty and preventable disease all over the world, though we could easily help them. Singer argues that this inconsistency is unjustifiable. The EAs agree, and have dedicated their lives to living out the radical implications of this philosophy. If distance is morally irrelevant, then devastating poverty and preventable disease surround us. Any break we take from working to reduce suffering throughout the world is like having a leisurely nap beside a lake where thousands of children are screaming for our help.

The EA movement started coalescing in Oxford in 2009 when the philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill came together with around 20 others to work out how to make radical altruism mainstream. MacAskill told me that they went by the jokey moniker ‘Super Hardcore Do-Gooders’, until they came up with ‘Effective Altruism’ in 2011. Along with various other EA-affiliated organisations, Ord and MacAskill co-founded Giving What We Can, which suggests a baseline donation of 10 per cent of your income to effective charities.

This is often what EA comes down to: working hard to earn money and then giving as much of it as you can to the needy. Good deeds come in many forms, of course, and there are other ways of making a difference. But the gauntlet that EA throws down is simply this: does your preferred good deed make as much of a difference as simply handing over the money? If not, how good a deed is it really?

O nce we’d settled in at the cottage, Hilton and I stepped out for a walk through the bits of forest that hadn’t been razed for pasture, and he asked if my script would be one of the best scripts ever written. At the time I thought he was trolling me. I obviously couldn’t say ‘yes’, but ‘no’ would somehow feel like an admission of failure. It was only after talking to other EAs that I came to understand what he was getting at. As EAs see it, writing scripts and making movies demands resources that, in the right hands, could have saved lives. If the movie in question is clearly frivolous, this seems impossible to justify ethically. If, on the other hand, you’re making the best movie of all time… well, it could almost start to be worthwhile. But I told Hilton ‘no’, and felt a lingering sense of futility as we tramped on through the stinging nettles around the cottage.

I did manage to finish the script that weekend, despite Hilton’s crushing anti-pep talk. I felt good about it – but something about the movement had captured my interest, and over the following weeks I kept talking to EAs. Like Hilton, most of them seemed doubtful that art had much power to alter the world for the better. And somewhere between submitting my script in September and receiving the regret-to-inform in December, I started to feel like they might have a point.

The central premise of Effective Altruism is alluringly intuitive. Simply put, EAs want to reduce suffering and increase lifespan and happiness. That’s it; nothing else matters. As Morgan explained in an email to me:

I find that most of us seem to ultimately care about something close to the concept of ‘wellbeing’ – we want everyone to be happy and fulfilled, and we promote anything that leads to humans and animals feeling happy and fulfilled. I rarely meet Effective Altruists who care about, say, beauty, knowledge, life or the environment for their own sake – rather, they tend to find that they care about these things only insofar as they contribute to wellbeing.

From this point of view, the importance of most individual works of art would have to be negligible compared with, say, deworming 1,000 children. An idea often paraphrased in EA circles is that it doesn’t matter who does something – what matters is that it gets done. And though artists often pride themselves on the uniqueness of their individuality, it doesn’t follow that they have something uniquely valuable to offer society. On the contrary, says Diego Caleiro, director of the Brazil-based Institute for Ethics, Rationality and the Future of Humanity, most of them are ‘counterfactually replaceable’: one artist is as pretty much as useful as the next. And of course, the supply is plentiful.

Replaceability is a core concept in EA. The idea is that the only good that counts is what you accomplish over and above what the next person would have done in your place. In equation form, Your Apparent Good Achieved minus the Good Your Counterfactual Replacement Would Have Achieved equals Your Actual Good Achieved. This is a disconcerting calculation, because even if you think you’ve been doing great work, your final score could be small or negative. While it might seem as though working for a charity makes a major positive impact, you have to remember the other eager applicants who would have worked just as hard if they’d been hired instead. Is the world in which you got the job really better than the world in which the other person did? Maybe not.

Artists paint the beautiful landscape in front of them while the rest of the world burns

It is in the interests of becoming irreplaceable that a lot of EAs promote ‘earning to give’ – getting a well-paid job and donating carefully. If you score a lucrative programming job and then give away half your income, most of your competition probably wouldn’t have donated as much money. As far as the great universal calculation of utility is concerned, you have made yourself hard to replace. Artists, meanwhile, paint the beautiful landscape in front of them while the rest of the world burns.

Ozzie Gooen, a programmer for the UK-based ethical careers website 80,000 Hours, told me about a satirical superhero he invented to spoof creative people in rich countries who care more about making cool art than helping needy people, yet feel good about themselves because it’s better than nothing. ‘I make the joke of “Net-Positive Man,”’ Gooen said. ‘He has all the resources and advantages and money, and he goes around the world doing net-positive things. Like he’ll see someone drowning in a well, and he’s like, “But don’t worry, I’m here. Net positive! Here’s a YouTube Video! It’s net positive!”’

I f, despite all this, you remain committed to a career in the arts, is there any hope for you? In fact, yes: two routes to the praiseworthy life remain open. If you happen to be successful already, you can always earn to give. And if you aren’t, perhaps you can use your talent to attract new EA recruits and spread altruistic ideas.

‘We’re actually very stacked out with people who have good mathematic skills, good philosophy skills,’ Robert Wiblin, executive director of the Centre for Effective Altruism, told me. ‘I would really love to have some artists. We really need visual designers. It would be great to have people think about how Effective Altruism could be promoted through art.’ Aesthetic mavericks who anticipate long wilderness years of rejection and struggle, however, would seem to have little to contribute to the cause. Perhaps they should think about ditching their dreams for what Caleiro calls ‘an area with higher expected returns’.

For an aspiring screenwriter like me, this is a disappointing message. Brian Tomasik, the American writer of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, told me that artists who abandon their craft to help others should take solace in the theory that all possible artwork already exists somewhere in the quantum multiverse. As he put it: ‘With reducing suffering, we care about decreasing the quantity that exists, but with artwork, it seems you’d only care about existence or not in a binary fashion. So if all art already exists within some measure, isn’t that good enough?’

I actually do find that mildly comforting, if it’s true, but I’m not convinced that it will win many supporters to the EA cause. The problem, ironically, might actually be an aesthetic one.

Effective Altruism is part subversive, part conformist: subversive in its radical egalitarianism and its critique of complacent privilege; conformist in that it’s another force channeling us towards the traditional success model. The altruistic Übermensch is a hard-working money mover, a clean-cut advocate or a brilliant innovator of utility-improving devices or ideas. As usual, creative types are ignored if their ideas aren’t lucrative or if they don’t support a favoured ideology. Crass materialism and ethical anti-materialism now seem to share identical means: earning money or rephrasing the ideas of others. But there are plenty of people drawn to the media and the arts who care about making the world better. For them to accept the EA position will often require that they give up what they love to do most. What do EAs say to that? For the most part, they say ‘tough’.

‘Effective Altruism would sometimes say that the thing you most enjoy isn’t the most moral thing to do’

‘What’s implied by utilitarianism,’ explained Michael Bitton, a once-aspiring Canadian filmmaker turned EA, ‘is that nothing is sacred. Everything that exists is subject to utilitarian calculations. So there’s no such thing as, “Oh, this is art, or, oh, this is my religion, therefore it’s exempt from ethical considerations.”’ Wiblin has a similar view. ‘It is true that Effective Altruism would sometimes say that the thing you most enjoy isn’t the most moral thing to do,’ he told me. ‘And yeah, some people wanted to be writers, but actually instead they should go into development aid or go into activism or something else.’

Still, disappointed arts types might be able to console themselves with the thought that not even science is exempt from EA’s remorseless logic. ‘I myself was extremely interested in evolutionary biology,’ Wiblin said, ‘and I would have liked to become an academic in that area. But I couldn’t really justify it on the effects that it has on helping other people, even though I found it fascinating.’

T he iron logic of replaceability leaves many dreams dead on the ground, to be sure. But is this a problem with EA as an ideology, or a problem with reality? It would be great if the arts and humanities were hugely beneficial to the world, because they tend to be personally satisfying. Still, if they’re not in fact helping much, artists might be operating on some questionable values. Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering? Would you rather contribute to the culture of rich societies than work to reduce the suffering of the poor, or of future generations? Is it not arbitrary to fill the world with your own personal spin on things, simply because it’s yours?

Here’s a simple test to determine if you’re creating art for yourself or for the world. If you discovered that someone else had independently come up with a project idea that you’d also had, but they produced and distributed their work first, would you be upset? Or would you be thrilled that this vitally important stuff was out there, altering perspectives and making everything better in a real, quantifiable way – even though it wouldn’t increase your social status?

‘I think that there’s sort of a mass delusion among artists and writers that just because there’s almost nothing that confers more privilege and prestige and symbolic capital than art, just because it’s high-status, people think it’s of a high importance,’ said the Australian writer Chris Rodley. ‘And I think that’s wrong. Which is probably a weird, contradictory position for someone who wants to do art to take.’

Rodley is one of the two EAs I talked to with a media and arts background. The other was Michael Bitton, who is a postgraduate in media production in Toronto. ‘I wanted to be a filmmaker, and then I thought, “Well what good does this do?”’ he told me. ‘So I kind of stopped wanting to be a filmmaker.’

Despite their reservations, both Rodley and Bitton are investigating the kinds of creative projects with potential to do the most good, on the assumption that it could sometimes make sense for EAs to influence culture through arts and media. For Bitton, this means questioning whether ‘the traditional criteria of artistic greatness, like the profundity of ideas, or the emotional impact, or originality or timelessness or popularity’, automatically translates into good consequences. ‘The concept of artistic integrity is inherently in opposition to the concept of Effective Altruism,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think you could go all the way Effective Altruist as an artist without compromising your “artistic integrity”.’ In theory, Bitton suggests, ‘you could have an artist who’s making stuff that he or she has no interest in whatsoever, doesn’t like, doesn’t find interesting or funny, doesn’t know the point of, but that’s the optimal work of art according to our magic consequences calculator…’

‘what greater utilitarian deed could you accomplish than averting infinite suffering?’

Rodley suggests that EA artists could have something to learn from the medieval period, when social value and impact were the goals of art, before the ‘art for art’s sake mythology’ shifted the focus to intrinsic merit. Take the Christian mystery plays: ‘They were proto-utilitarian art works. A lot of them were trying to save the audience’s souls. And what greater utilitarian deed could you accomplish than averting infinite suffering?’

Of course, most EAs don’t believe in souls, much less eternal damnation, so a return to passion plays and Last Supper paintings isn’t what they’re suggesting. They’re more interested in how we could use art to reduce the suffering of humans, animals, and future beings – including AI computers and emulated minds. I talked to Bitton and Rodley separately, but they converged on some general guidelines for the utilitarian-minded artist.

Firstly, the entertainment value of a project is fleeting, so what really matters is how it influences political or social behaviour. That’s why narrative, or at least some way of expressing concrete ideas, is essential. ‘It’s hard to see how a vase or something would really impact culture in any one way, because what does it teach you about life?’ Bitton said. He suggests that it might be useful to sneak good memes such as ‘racism is bad’ or ‘sexism is bad’ into mainstream fictional works, especially if you can avoid the heavy-handed ‘very special episode’ feel.

Rodley, meanwhile, pointed to experimental sound design as an anti-utilitarian dead end. In general, the avant-garde is suspect because art’s impact grows by reaching larger audiences, which gives the advantage to books, films, lyrical songs, video games and smartphone apps that make altruistic ideas palatable. ‘Look at Singer’s shallow-pond analogy,’ Rodley said. ‘In a way, that’s sort of an artistic, fictional parable. It’s quite striking and has many of the features of a creative work.’

Still, if we were to consult our magic utilitarian consequences calculator, how often would it tell us to bother making art at all? Persuasive, progressive art might be better than nothing, but that doesn’t make it an optimal use of time and resources. Even if a socially minded piece of media gets enough attention to make a positive impact (rare enough in itself), its noticeable effects are often mixed.

Rodley pointed out that the US TV series Will and Grace might have made some Americans more accepting of gay people, but it also arguably imposed ‘homonormative’ expectations on how gay people are supposed to act. Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) apparently turned many white Americans against slavery while also perpetuating damaging stereotypes. The US documentary Searching for Sugar Man (2012) claims that the music of Sixto Rodriguez helped to inspire anti-apartheid protestors in South Africa, but presents this as an accidental and serendipitous side-effect rather than something Rodriguez could have consciously set out to do. Famous artists have a lot of influence and money to give away to good causes. But, said Rodley: ‘By definition, most artists are mediocre, and their art doesn’t really please many people, if any.’

If what you want to do is make the world better, the impact of paying to treat many people with curable diseases might seem a little humdrum compared with the revolution in human consciousness that will surely come when you publish your novel. But if donating to charity feels a bit generic, the lives it saves are not. All of which to is to say, when I thought that writing a movie was the best way for me to contribute to the world, I was almost certainly kidding myself. Then again, to some extent, we all do.

‘If you accept the shallow-pond analogy, everyone is morally horrific,’ said Rodley. ‘Even Peter Singer himself. Everyone can be doing more than they currently are.’

For now, that will have to be my justification. I’m not ready to give up writing. I’m not ready to take up some high-paid job that I’d hate in order to reduce the world’s suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man.

The dangers of AI farming

AI could lead to new ways for people to abuse animals for financial gain. That’s why we need strong ethical guidelines

Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert & Jonathan Birch

Thinkers and theories

A man beyond categories

Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought

War and peace

Legacy of the Scythians

How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine

Peter Mumford

Public health

It’s dirty work

In caring for and bearing with human suffering, hospital staff perform extreme emotional labour. Is there a better way?

Susanna Crossman

Social psychology

The magic of the mundane

Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman realised that every action is deeply revealing of the social norms by which we live

Lucy McDonald

Stories and literature

The real Miss Julie

Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

Elisabeth Åsbrink

Essay on Why Art Is Ageless And Timeless

Students are often asked to write an essay on Why Art Is Ageless And Timeless in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Why Art Is Ageless And Timeless

Art connects across time.

Art is special because it can connect people from different times. A painting made hundreds of years ago can still make someone today feel happy, sad, or amazed. This shows that even as the world changes, the feelings and ideas that art can share do not get old.

Art Is a Universal Language

Art doesn’t need words to be understood. No matter where you are from or what language you speak, you can understand what an artist is trying to say through their work. This makes art a language that everyone can understand, no matter the time or place.

Art Tells Stories of the Past

Art is like a time machine. It can show us what life was like long ago, what people cared about, and how they saw the world. By looking at art, we can learn stories from the past that words alone might not tell us. This helps us understand and remember history in a unique way.

250 Words Essay on Why Art Is Ageless And Timeless

Art’s ageless and timeless beauty.

Art has the unique ability to transcend time and age. It remains relevant and meaningful, regardless of its era of creation or the viewer’s background. Here are a few reasons why art is considered ageless and timeless:

Universal Themes and Emotions

Art often captures and expresses universal human themes and emotions. These themes, such as love, loss, joy, and sadness, are relatable to people of all ages and cultures. A painting from centuries ago can still evoke powerful emotions in a modern viewer, demonstrating the timelessness of human experiences.

Enduring Techniques and Materials

Many art forms use techniques and materials that can endure for centuries. Paintings created with high-quality pigments and canvases can remain vibrant and well-preserved for generations. Sculptures made from durable materials like marble or bronze can withstand the test of time. This physical longevity contributes to the agelessness of art.

Historical and Cultural Significance

Art often reflects the historical and cultural context in which it was created. It provides a window into the past, allowing people to understand the values, beliefs, and daily lives of previous generations. While the historical context may change, the artistic expression itself remains relevant as a testament to human history and cultural diversity.

Artistic Innovation and Evolution

Art is constantly evolving, with new styles, techniques, and genres emerging over time. This evolution keeps art fresh and exciting, attracting new audiences and interpretations. Even as art forms change, the core elements of creativity, expression, and communication remain timeless.

In conclusion, art is ageless and timeless because it captures universal themes, utilizes enduring materials, reflects historical and cultural significance, and continues to evolve. Its ability to transcend time and connect with people of all backgrounds makes art a truly remarkable and enduring human endeavor.

500 Words Essay on Why Art Is Ageless And Timeless

Art: transcending time and age.

Art, in its myriad forms, holds a unique position in human history and culture, transcending the boundaries of time and age. It possesses an ageless and timeless quality that continues to captivate and inspire individuals across generations.

A Reflection of the Human Experience

Art serves as a mirror, reflecting the human experience in all its complexity and diversity. It captures the emotions, thoughts, and imaginations of countless individuals, providing a shared space for connection and understanding. Whether it’s a painting, a sculpture, a musical composition, or a literary masterpiece, art has the power to evoke a range of emotions, from joy and wonder to sadness and reflection.

A Timeless Legacy

Great works of art often endure for centuries, becoming part of our collective cultural heritage. They are studied, admired, and celebrated by generations of people, regardless of their age or background. This enduring quality is a testament to the universality of human emotions and experiences that art so effectively portrays.

Cultural Exchange and Understanding

Art facilitates cultural exchange and understanding between different societies and civilizations. It allows us to glimpse into the lives, beliefs, and values of people from diverse backgrounds, fostering empathy and appreciation for our shared humanity. Through art, we can learn about different cultures, their traditions, and their unique perspectives on the world.

While art is rooted in the past, it is also constantly evolving and adapting to the changing times. New artistic movements, styles, and techniques emerge, challenging conventional norms and pushing the boundaries of creativity. This ongoing process of innovation ensures that art remains relevant and engaging, speaking to the sensibilities of each new generation.

Art as a Source of Inspiration and Reflection

Art has the power to inspire and uplift individuals, providing solace, encouragement, and a sense of purpose. It can spark creativity, challenge our assumptions, and encourage us to reflect on our own lives and the world around us. Great works of art often leave a lasting impact, shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and values.

In conclusion, art is ageless and timeless because it speaks to the universal human experience, transcends cultural boundaries, and continues to evolve and captivate audiences across generations. It is a powerful force that enriches our lives, inspires creativity, and fosters understanding among people of all ages and backgrounds.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Why Are Names Important
• Essay on Why Are Memories Important
• Essay on Why Are Drugs Bad For You

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Debra Spark on Whether Art Can Truly Help People

In conversation with mitzi rapkin on the first draft podcast.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Debra Spark about her new novel, Discipline .

Subscribe and download the episode , wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Tell me a little bit about your interest in art as a theme. One of your main characters, Gracie, the art appraiser, had a central question in her life. The narrator says, what use is beauty. She’s thinking when people are really struggling, and there are wars or strife, or homelessness what good is beauty? And I think that was also a central question of the book.

Debra Spark: I think it’s a central question of my life. So, my twin sister has always been in anti-poverty work. She was in homelessness for forever, and now she does work for the environment. And I’m aware that I don’t do something good in that way, like in a direct way. I mean, yes, yes, yes, you can say, Oh, you’re helping people create fiction. And, you know, if you help people appreciate fiction, you know, reading fiction makes you more empathetic. And, you know, you can say all that, which I believe to be true. But I do also have the thoughts that that character does, you know, it’s like, okay, I want to be a better person, I want to improve the world, make the world a better place, and yet I’m devoted, I am devoted, as a person who writes novels, or I’m working on nonfiction now, but I’m not directly helping people, you know, I write a check to this cause and that cause.  So, to have a whole life that is devoted, really to beauty as the character does, or as I would say my husband does, he’s a painter, I think it sort of puts you in a sort of interesting relationship to your own ethics. And it’s hard, at least for me, I do wonder about it. And I actually wonder about it sometimes when people start to get very spiritual in the way they talk about art, and it’s not that I don’t believe it, because I do but sometimes I think people get almost too grandiose for art.  It makes me think of a very famous Solzhenitsyn speech. Do you know his Nobel speech? He talks about people saying things like, art will save us. You know, basically, art will save us and then he’s like, wait a second, you know, this isn’t a direct quote, but more or less  a quote from Solzhenitsyn, he says just when in the bloodthirsty history of mankind has art ever saved anyone from anything? I mean, that’s basically his question in his Nobel Prize speech.  And he does actually almost work around to say art does save people. But I think that is part of my question, you know, you look at the present moment, of course. Yeah, I don’t think art is going to get us out of the Middle East situation or, you know, solve Ukraine and Russia, which isn’t to say that the art that comes out of that isn’t important for the people who are suffering that but you know, I jump through hoops in my own mind when I’m thinking about what I’m doing.

Debra Spark is the award-winning author of five novels, including Unknown Caller , which was picked for Maine’s statewide summer READ ME program.  She has also published two collections of short stories; and two books of essays on fiction writing called And Then Something Happened and Curious Attractions .   Her book reviews, short fiction, articles, op-eds, and essays have appeared in Agni, American Scholar, AWP Writers’ Chronicle , and the Boston Globe among others.  Her new novel is Discipline .  She is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Writing Essays in Art History

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

These OWL resources provide guidance on typical genres with the art history discipline that may appear in professional settings or academic assignments, including museum catalog entries, museum title cards, art history analysis, notetaking, and art history exams.

Art History Analysis – Formal Analysis and Stylistic Analysis

Typically in an art history class the main essay students will need to write for a final paper or for an exam is a formal or stylistic analysis.

A formal analysis is just what it sounds like – you need to analyze the form of the artwork. This includes the individual design elements – composition, color, line, texture, scale, contrast, etc. Questions to consider in a formal analysis is how do all these elements come together to create this work of art? Think of formal analysis in relation to literature – authors give descriptions of characters or places through the written word. How does an artist convey this same information?

Organize your information and focus on each feature before moving onto the text – it is not ideal to discuss color and jump from line to then in the conclusion discuss color again. First summarize the overall appearance of the work of art – is this a painting? Does the artist use only dark colors? Why heavy brushstrokes? etc and then discuss details of the object – this specific animal is gray, the sky is missing a moon, etc. Again, it is best to be organized and focused in your writing – if you discuss the animals and then the individuals and go back to the animals you run the risk of making your writing unorganized and hard to read. It is also ideal to discuss the focal of the piece – what is in the center? What stands out the most in the piece or takes up most of the composition?

A stylistic approach can be described as an indicator of unique characteristics that analyzes and uses the formal elements (2-D: Line, color, value, shape and 3-D all of those and mass).The point of style is to see all the commonalities in a person’s works, such as the use of paint and brush strokes in Van Gogh’s work. Style can distinguish an artist’s work from others and within their own timeline, geographical regions, etc.

Methods & Theories To Consider:

Expressionism

Instructuralism

Postmodernism

Social Art History

Biographical Approach

Poststructuralism

Museum Studies

Visual Cultural Studies

Stylistic Analysis Example:

The following is a brief stylistic analysis of two Greek statues, an example of how style has changed because of the “essence of the age.” Over the years, sculptures of women started off as being plain and fully clothed with no distinct features, to the beautiful Venus/Aphrodite figures most people recognize today. In the mid-seventh century to the early fifth, life-sized standing marble statues of young women, often elaborately dress in gaily painted garments were created known as korai. The earliest korai is a Naxian women to Artemis. The statue wears a tight-fitted, belted peplos, giving the body a very plain look. The earliest korai wore the simpler Dorian peplos, which was a heavy woolen garment. From about 530, most wear a thinner, more elaborate, and brightly painted Ionic linen and himation. A largely contrasting Greek statue to the korai is the Venus de Milo. The Venus from head to toe is six feet seven inches tall. Her hips suggest that she has had several children. Though her body shows to be heavy, she still seems to almost be weightless. Viewing the Venus de Milo, she changes from side to side. From her right side she seems almost like a pillar and her leg bears most of the weight. She seems be firmly planted into the earth, and since she is looking at the left, her big features such as her waist define her. The Venus de Milo had a band around her right bicep. She had earrings that were brutally stolen, ripping her ears away. Venus was noted for loving necklaces, so it is very possibly she would have had one. It is also possible she had a tiara and bracelets. Venus was normally defined as “golden,” so her hair would have been painted. Two statues in the same region, have throughout history, changed in their style.

Compare and Contrast Essay

Most introductory art history classes will ask students to write a compare and contrast essay about two pieces – examples include comparing and contrasting a medieval to a renaissance painting. It is always best to start with smaller comparisons between the two works of art such as the medium of the piece. Then the comparison can include attention to detail so use of color, subject matter, or iconography. Do the same for contrasting the two pieces – start small. After the foundation is set move on to the analysis and what these comparisons or contrasting material mean – ‘what is the bigger picture here?’ Consider why one artist would wish to show the same subject matter in a different way, how, when, etc are all questions to ask in the compare and contrast essay. If during an exam it would be best to quickly outline the points to make before tackling writing the essay.

Compare and Contrast Example:

Stele of Hammurabi from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), ca. 1792 – 1750 BCE, Basalt, height of stele approx. 7’ height of relief 28’

Stele, relief sculpture, Art as propaganda – Hammurabi shows that his law code is approved by the gods, depiction of land in background, Hammurabi on the same place of importance as the god, etc.

Top of this stele shows the relief image of Hammurabi receiving the law code from Shamash, god of justice, Code of Babylonian social law, only two figures shown, different area and time period, etc.

Stele of Naram-sin , Sippar Found at Susa c. 2220 - 2184 bce. Limestone, height 6'6"

Stele, relief sculpture, Example of propaganda because the ruler (like the Stele of Hammurabi) shows his power through divine authority, Naramsin is the main character due to his large size, depiction of land in background, etc.

Akkadian art, made of limestone, the stele commemorates a victory of Naramsin, multiple figures are shown specifically soldiers, different area and time period, etc.

Iconography

Regardless of what essay approach you take in class it is absolutely necessary to understand how to analyze the iconography of a work of art and to incorporate into your paper. Iconography is defined as subject matter, what the image means. For example, why do things such as a small dog in a painting in early Northern Renaissance paintings represent sexuality? Additionally, how can an individual perhaps identify these motifs that keep coming up?

The following is a list of symbols and their meaning in Marriage a la Mode by William Hogarth (1743) that is a series of six paintings that show the story of marriage in Hogarth’s eyes.

• Man has pockets turned out symbolizing he has lost money and was recently in a fight by the state of his clothes.
• Lap dog shows loyalty but sniffs at woman’s hat in the husband’s pocket showing sexual exploits.
• Black dot on husband’s neck believed to be symbol of syphilis.
• Mantel full of ugly Chinese porcelain statues symbolizing that the couple has no class.
• Butler had to go pay bills, you can tell this by the distasteful look on his face and that his pockets are stuffed with bills and papers.
• Card game just finished up, women has directions to game under foot, shows her easily cheating nature.
• Paintings of saints line a wall of the background room, isolated from the living, shows the couple’s complete disregard to faith and religion.
• The dangers of sexual excess are underscored in the Hograth by placing Cupid among ruins, foreshadowing the inevitable ruin of the marriage.
• Eventually the series (other five paintings) shows that the woman has an affair, the men duel and die, the woman hangs herself and the father takes her ring off her finger symbolizing the one thing he could salvage from the marriage.

By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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Gagosian Quarterly

Spring 2024 Issue

Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art

Author and artist ross simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the goetheanum in switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer rudolf steiner on twentieth-century artists..

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/Macarena Kralj

Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. His work comprises paintings, drawings, essays, dialogues, musical compositions, performance, and fiction.

When I started believing in contemporary art, I found my imagination possessed by the work of Joseph Beuys. It was the kind of totalizing obsession that happened often in the highly receptive time of youth, sending me into a frenzy of new thoughts and compulsory artmaking. The most generative of these infatuations were the artists who served as portals into a knowledge beyond art, and Beuys proved especially useful in this way, pointing toward concepts and figures I had never before encountered, from Tatar shamanism to Celtic mythology to a remarkable man named Rudolf Steiner.

Like many Americans, I was unfamiliar with Steiner, though I was intimately familiar with the fruits of his work: I had eaten his food, rubbed his salves on my body, and known many friends to attend his schools. Steiner was a polymath and his work took many, many forms: agriculture, education, medicine, philosophy, mysticism, politics, architecture, dance, design, sculpture, and painting. He invented biodynamic farming, Waldorf schooling, the Camphill Movement (for children with developmental disabilities), Weleda naturopathic products (Skin Food, Salt Toothpaste, and my personal favorite deodorant), eurythmy (a kind of dance), and anthroposophy, the all-encompassing philosophy that serves as the foundation for all of Steiner’s work.

It’s an almost inhuman spectrum of accomplishment from a man who believed there was no boundary to human knowledge. But what’s especially surprising about Steiner’s work is how it continues to broadly affect culture now, a century after his death. The sheer magnitude of what he produced seems to allow an ongoing study of his thought: his collected works comprise 422 volumes, including his many books, essays, plays, lectures (6,000+), and 80 volumes on his artistic work, all completed by his early death, at the age of sixty-four.

Stained glass inside Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/Xue Li

Steiner’s influence in art has also been potent, though he is only rarely included in the canon of modern art. Beuys, for example, saw his own work as a way to transmit Steiner’s theory of “social threefolding,” which aims to balance the three spheres of society—political, economic, and cultural—and to avoid the dangerous systems that emerge when one sphere dominates, such as communism, capitalism, and religion. Beuys said, “I know that, from [Steiner], a mission was given to me to gradually remove people’s alienation and mistrust toward the supersensible through my means. In political thinking—the field I have to be working on daily—it is a matter of realizing the Threefold Social Order as quickly as possible.” 1 Beuys’s blackboard drawings charting this theory are direct homages to Steiner’s very similar blackboard diagrams of cosmic, pastel fireworks.

Over the last century, many artists engaged with Steiner’s work. Some of the Bauhaus artists (Vasily Kandinsky, etc.) attended his lectures and closely studied his ideas, as did writers from Franz Kafka to Saul Bellow. The architect Marion Mahony Griffin (one of the world’s first licensed female architects), the famed conductor Bruno Walter, the novelist Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman to win the Nobel Prize), the Symbolist painter Hermann Linde, and the Swiss physician Hans Jenny were all official anthroposophists. This is a group of innovators.

Early in his career, Steiner was associated with theosophy, a religion principally founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky in New York in 1875. He lectured for almost a decade in theosophical centers and led the religion’s Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. Theosophy is an indisputably essential part of modern art, directly inspiring such artists as Max Beckmann, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and Kandinsky—the last three of whom have been variously credited with the birth of abstract art. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art  (1912) is basically a theosophical study of form, color, and composition. In an interview last fall on the podcast The Art Angle , the artist Carol Bove remarked, “The early twentieth century needed theosophy to become abstract, but when abstraction developed again after World War II, artists didn’t need it anymore.” 2

The influence of theosophy on the early avant-garde is well documented but not always accepted, probably because of a general suspicion of esotericism across culture: religious believers may see it as heretical, atheist materialists see it as incongruous with science, and art historians usually favor the analytic precision of formalism over the murkiness of spirituality.

In recent years, however, the apotheosis of the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint as a prophet of abstraction (mostly due to the 2018–19 show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum) has compelled critics to reckon with the esotericism at the foundation of modernism. Af Klint studied theosophy but never joined the Theosophical Society, and when Steiner left the faith to create the anthroposophical movement, in 1912, she quickly became an anthroposophist. From then on she maintained a lifelong interest in Steiner’s work and several times asked him for advice on her paintings, which he gave. 3 Indeed, a decade after Steiner’s death, in 1925, af Klint was still lecturing to the Anthroposophical Society about the harmony between her work and his ideas, and she often spent long retreats at the society’s headquarters in Switzerland, a singular biomorphic edifice known as the Goetheanum.

art . . . for many of us, is a practice of transforming matter into something more than the sum of its parts, something transcendent and essentially nonmaterial.

I recently traveled to Zurich for an exhibition of my paintings and drawings at suns.works, a show held in a former bank office at the top of a skyscraper downtown. While there I planned to visit the Goetheanum, about an hour away in the village of Dornach, which in turn is about twenty minutes from Basel and another twenty from some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

To arrive at this architectural wonder, designed by Steiner himself, my wife and I walked through the village, up a hill, and crossed a grand esplanade to the Goetheanum’s front doors, heavy and thick, with unexpected, asymmetrical handles. The building’s facade is gray and brutalist, but its curved, alien forms appear soft, almost viscous. Its architecture is often called expressionist and recalls Antoni Gaudí in its organic freedom. It has been praised by architects as disparate as Frank Lloyd Wright and Zaha Hadid and is described as foreshadowing the work of Buckminster Fuller. 4 Like these designers, Steiner took his principles from the natural world, so there are almost no right angles in the Goetheanum. Steiner believed that hard lines imprison the mind, which is why so much anthroposophical art expresses the fluid energy of a wave.

Inside, a statue of a celestial-looking being greets visitors, its face oddly convex, as if its awareness were pointed totally inward. The building is open to the public daily, and when I was there, on a Wednesday afternoon, a few international travelers were wandering through the grounds. The Goetheanum World Conference was held a few days later and various rooms were being prepared for the event. This is in fact the second Goetheanum, and the new construction is in some way a reinvention of the original. The first, built a decade before this one, was mostly made of curved wooden boat panels and burned to the ground on New Year’s Eve, 1922. Anthroposophists claim that the fire was arson, set by enemy esotericists who resented Steiner’s revelations of secret occult knowledge to the world. To remedy this problem, the new Goetheanum was made from concrete.

I’d been told by a German friend that the staff didn’t have the most welcoming manner, and this immediately seemed true. The attendant at the front desk barely answered my questions and a grumpy barista in the café would not meet my eyes as he served me a whole-grain croissant, which, like most of the menu, had been biodynamically produced. There was a mystery here, and no one seemed interested in explaining, let alone proselytizing.

Yet even for a visitor with no knowledge of Steiner’s ideas, someone who accidentally stumbles upon the building, the Goetheanum is clearly the manifestation of a very fastidious philosophy. Every wall is painted in soothing sponge-painted pastels, and even the inconspicuous radiator in the corner is a pleasant matte periwinkle. Light fixtures, architraves, chairs, window frames, and doors are all molded with the same dimples and rivulets as the building’s exterior. The sculptor Edith Maryon, who lived and taught at the Goetheanum, helped to design the building, and you can feel this aesthetic intention in every subtle choice.

My wife, Kate, had an instant knee-jerk reaction against the place. The slightest whiff of cult repulses her, and the Goetheanum seems to wear its beliefs as proudly as any church, but anthroposophy is not a system of belief. Nobody is worshipping Steiner, as they might do with a guru or charismatic leader. Steiner despised ideology, which is by nature limited to its own doctrine, and this is partly why he rejected theosophy. John Bloom, general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, describes anthroposophy as “a path of inquiry, a way of being in the world, and of service to the world.” 5 The novelist and podcaster Conner Habib calls it his non-exclusive “spiritual headquarters” from which he leaves to explore other ideas. 6 The visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Steiner offers us a worldview that explains everything—or almost everything—and provides human development with an appropriate place in the spiritual domain.” 7

Exterior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/Xue Li

The word “anthroposophy,” derived from the Greek, means “human wisdom,” and the philosophy is both a practical set of principles for living in society and a vast, impossibly abstract cosmology for attaining mystical wisdom. Steiner called his work “spiritual science,” which points to the kind of polarities he was attempting to reconcile. His desire, as Tarkovsky said, was to understand everything.

Among Steiner’s central beliefs was the idea that “matter cannot exist and operate without spirit, nor spirit without matter.” 8 In other words, materialism and spirituality together comprise true reality. This kind of thinking has clear applications in art, which, for many of us, is a practice of transforming matter into something more than the sum of its parts, something transcendent and essentially nonmaterial. Steiner saw beauty and art as the most effective ways of bringing the spiritual into material form, and he did this even in his writing. In researching this essay, I read his classic book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (1904), which, despite sounding like a how-to spiritual guide, felt like art, like a mystery without resolution. What I have read by Steiner rarely provides clarity but often activates the unknown within me.

Still, like my wife, I have some resistance to Steiner. I grew up Catholic, and anthroposophy often uses Christianity as the vocabulary of its mythology—though any dogmatic Christian would be appalled by Steiner’s mystical interpretations and dark, ancient gods. Nevertheless, this Christ-y language sometimes makes it hard for me to experience the philosophy without the clutter of my own childhood prejudice.

There’s also a whiff of the 1800s German idealist movement in anthroposophy—Hegel, Kant, etc.—which, after Nazism, can feel like an aesthetic turnoff. But Steiner was an adamant enemy of the Nazis. He attacked imperialism and anti-Semitism (the White Rose, famed anti-Nazi group, was highly influenced by his work). In return, the Nazis called him a traitor and Hitler actually declared “war against Steiner.” Ultimately, like many spiritual thinkers, he emphasized the unseen life force of humanity, rather than the superficial levels of bodily identity.

For Steiner, colors became metaphors. “If one releases color from objects and lives with color,” he wrote, “then it begins to reveal profound secrets, and the entire world becomes a flooding, surging sea of color.”

That said, Steiner’s ideas were fundamentally European: he disliked theosophy’s appropriation of Eastern ideas and instead focused on the philosophical traditions of European culture. He also rejected the theosophists’ belief that the young boy Jiddu Krishnamurti, the son of a clerk at their international headquarters in Adyar, India, would grow up to play the spiritual role of “World Teacher”—and so did Krishnamurti himself, though he did go on to become one of the great sages of the twentieth century and, like Steiner, a lucid voice against ideology.

Among the Germanic principles that Steiner drew on was the idea of the  Gesamtkunstwerk , a term popularized by Richard Wagner to describe a total work of art, which calls upon many art forms and evokes art in its every aspect. For Wagner the  Gesamtkunstwerk was opera, combining music, literature, theater, and visual spectacle, and perhaps this is why theater is centrally important to anthroposophy. At the Goetheanum, the great hall is literally the central room in the building, taking up most of its capacious square footage, containing its most ambitious artworks, and staging many performances, including Steiner’s own “mystery plays.”

Following the way of the Gesamtkunstwerk , Steiner wanted every component of his campus to be simultaneously formal and functional. The towering boiler room, for instance, which looks like a flame licking the sky, is on full display in its own building rather than hidden in a basement. (Steiner also did not want its hum to disturb the artists.) Even the knobs on the doors to the artist studios require a curious, unexpected motion to open, which was Steiner’s way of reminding artists to refresh their thinking before starting work.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/Xue Li

All of the buildings on the campus together create an almost self-sufficient society, with bookstores, a school, a biodynamic café, daycare, a grocery store, administration offices, a puppet theater, a power station, and a farm supplied with livestock. These buildings are of an aesthetic piece with the Goetheanum, as are the surrounding neighborhoods, where over 180 buildings were built using the same organic principles. This whole village becomes an extension of Steiner’s total work of art.

Steiner was an artist but history rarely regards him as one, as he lived before the great interdisciplinary age we are now entering. He was a decent draftsman and hand-designed much of the graphic work for the anthroposophical movement’s books, magazines, and products (including Weleda’s mysterious logo, looking out from Whole Foods shelves everywhere).

His primary talent, though, was as a visionary. As with many artists—Bosch, Michelangelo, Rubens, Bove, Jeff Koons, Jordan Wolfson—Steiner’s art was his ability to sketch out ideas, communicate their power, and then harness the talent of craftspeople to create something beyond skill. He worked with the artist Assya Turgenieff, for example, to fill the building with monochromatic stained-glass windows, each chronicling a spiritual quest. One of these striking windows, in blood red, depicts the Archangel Michael, a central figure in the anthroposophical mythos, and produces a haunting glow like no other stained glass I have ever seen. Likewise, Steiner collaborated with Maryon to carve the towering wooden summation of his ideas, The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman (1917–25), which is housed in its own room in the Goetheanum, where you are encouraged to sit and enjoy a long slow viewing.

Over time, thanks partly to the influence of his wife, the actress Marie Steiner–von Sivers, Steiner came to see art as primary to anthroposophy. He spoke of how art, science, and religion were once unified and have since become specialized and separated by academia. Anthroposophical art, by contrast, has no boundaries, but a sensibility that moves toward a total experience of nature.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Ross Simonini

In 1922, the painter Henni Geck asked Steiner to teach her how the spiritual laws could be demonstrated through painting. In response, Steiner created nine pastel “training” sketches that are now used in most introductory anthroposophical art classes. The drawings were scraggly motifs of the natural world—“nature moods,” he called them—and depicted the sunrise and sunset, the moon and the trees. Geck studied and mimicked these sketches and eventually taught them to her own students, including the artist Gerard Wagner, who described them as organisms: “They do not portray, they  live .” To work on them, she said, was to “unite with their inner essence” and go inward, into moral and cosmic experience. This was a way of training the artist to experience what Wagner called “pure, controlled will activity.” 9

For Steiner, the drawings’ purpose was to show how form arises naturally out of color, and the quintessential example of this principle appears in the work of Wagner, who painted the vast mural on the ceiling of the great hall: wraiths in a vivid heavenly whirlpool—a masterpiece of anthroposophical art.

Steiner’s entire spiritual/scientific/artistic worldview derives from a particular forebear, the Goetheanum’s namesake: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom many consider the greatest German writer of all time. Like Steiner, though, Goethe was as much polymath as poet, working across natural science, the literary arts, and political thought—Steiner said that Goethe “sought the path from artist to knower and found it.” 10

In his role as empirical scientist, Goethe developed a color theory that resisted the Newtonian idea of color as a purely optical event and emphasized its psycho-experiential aspects. In the history of science, Newton’s physics won out, but many thinkers have continued to study Goethean science, including the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Steiner adapted Goethe’s color theory to his own approach, which is more open than Goethe’s: for Steiner, colors became metaphors. “If one releases color from objects and lives with color,” he wrote, “then it begins to reveal profound secrets, and the entire world becomes a flooding, surging sea of color.” 11

At the Goetheanum, the walls are painted with gentle-colored natural dyes made from plants in the garden—copper beech, knapweed, coreopsis—as is Wagner’s ceiling mural. A descriptive sign at the center reads, “These forms and colours that are not static but change over time because they are alive.”

Waldorf schools, their pedagogy based on Steiner’s educational philosophy, have colored walls intended as representations of universal forces, such as good and evil or yin and yang. In class, children illustrate stories  about colors using nontoxic watercolors.

Though I never attended any Steiner-inflected school, more than one person who did has told me that the gentle palette of my paintings reminds them of their days in Waldorf education. I think this is a fair observation. Although I only learned of Steiner in my twenties, he was always present in the atmosphere around me, influencing how I formed my worldview.

In fact, the whole Goetheanum campus felt as familiar as my childhood in Northern California, another landscape of health food stores, organic farms, and craft fairs. The protohippy moment that occurred in Europe in the early twentieth century, with its back-to-the-land Lebensreform (Life reform) movement and the communes of Monte Verità, Switzerland—this all echoed into America, through tie-dye psychedelia in the 1960s, New Age culture in the 1970s, and the environmentalism that will likely characterize the next era of humanity. (Rachel Carson, the catalyst of so much ecological philosophy, was highly influenced by Steiner.)

Behind this cultural transformation was a peculiar German man wearing an ascot. His lifetime, a bright burst of energy, changed culture, but in a subtle enough way that few of us have ever heard the word “anthroposophy” pronounced aloud ( anne-throw-paw-sif-ee ).

But this obscurity is not a failure. In fact, the more I learn about Steiner’s life, the more I think that his hidden ubiquity might be his greatest work of all, as if his true ambition were to dissolve the memory of his physical form and transmute himself into pure historic momentum.

1 Joseph Beuys, in Volker Harlan, What Is Art? : Conversations with Joseph Beuys (West Hoathly, Sussex: Clairview Books, 2004).

2 Carol Bove, in “Artist Carol Bove on Curating Legendary Polymath Harry Smith,” The Art Angle , September 21, 2023. The remark appears in a discussion of the recent Harry Smith exhibition, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten , at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which Bove cocurated. Available online in various places, including https://news.artnet.com/multimedia/the-art-angle-podcast-artist-carol-bove-on-curating-legendary-polymath-harry-smith-2365920 (accessed November 26, 2023).

3 Lasse Hallström’s biopic Hilma  (2023) suggests that Rudolf Steiner somehow discouraged the artist, but this seems to be spurious—the Hilma af Klint Foundation claims that Steiner actually convinced her not to destroy her work.

4 See Reinhold Johann Fäth, “Rudolf Steiner Design: Spiritueller Funktionalismus Kunst,” PhD diss., Universität Konstanz, 2004.

5 John Bloom (by Tess Harper), “From the General Secretary,” Anthroposophical Society in America website, August 25, 2023. Available online at https://anthroposophy.org/from-the-general-secretary-15/ (accessed December 10, 2023).

6 Conner Habib, in “Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and Esoteric Christianity with Laura Scappaticci,” Against Everyone with Conner Habib , no. 225, June 13, 2023. Available onine at https://www.patreon.com/posts/84500445 (accessed December 10, 2023).

7 Andrei Tarkovsky, in “On Steiner and Anthroposophy: Nathan Federovsky Interviews Andrei Tarkovsky,” in What Is Happening in the Anthroposophical Society , July/August 1985. Available online at http://www.nostalghia.com/TheTopics/On_Steiner.html  (accessed December 10, 2023).

8 Steiner, The Spiritual-Scientific Basis of Goethe’s Work , 1906. Available online at https://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Articles/SSBoGW_index.html  (accessed December 10, 2023).

9 Gerard Wagner, “The Painter’s Notes,” in Steiner and Wagner, The Art of Colour and the Human Form: Seven Motif Sketches of Rudolf Steiner: Studies by Gerard Wagner , ed. Peter Stebbing (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2018). Available online at www.rudolf-steiner-malschule.ch/wpcontent/uploads/2015/10/AutobiographicalFragment-Gerard-Wagner.pdf (accessed December 15, 2023).

10 Steiner, quoted in David Adams, “The Goetheanum Cupola Reliefs,” being human , Summer 2013. A review of Stebbing, ed. and trans., The Goetheanum Cupola Reliefs of Rudolf Steiner: Paintings by Gerard Wagner (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2011). Available online at https://issuu.com/anthrousa/docs /bh9-final-web/s/13111088 (accessed December 11, 2023).

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History of Art and Visual Studies

By | Staff , College of Architecture, Art, and Planning

Esra Akcan , Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory (AAP), and Iftikhar Dadi , John H. Burris Professor of Art History and Visual Studies (A&S), recently published Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and their European Diasporas (Routledge, 2024) , a collection of essays on art and architecture that reveal both distinct and convergent histories, stories, and experiences of late 20th-century Muslim migrations and diasporas in Europe.

"During the second half of the 20th century, enormous compulsory migrations from these two countries resulted in significant Muslim diasporic communities in cities such as London and Berlin, yet they have never been studied together," says Akcan. "This book brings together an array of architecture and artistic media that responds to the conditions of the diaspora. What we find is that discrimination has been both the cause and result of migration — for example, internal problems have compelled citizens to emigrate, and blatant discriminatory and ideological constructs shape their experiences in their countries of arrival as well."

The book's subject matter is largely informed by a 2017 Mellon Collaborative Studies seminar co-taught at Cornell by Akcan and Dadi on the relationship between migration, discrimination, and the city. The seminar, which took place against the backdrop of the largest refugee crisis since World War II due to the war in Syria, prompted reflections on statecraft, neoliberalism, and crony capitalism and addressed matters related to statelessness, citizenship, human rights, and violence. Along with Akcan, Dadi, and other scholars, a number of doctoral students in the class contributed essays to the publication, including Aslihan Günhan, Ecem Sarıçayır, Lara Fresko, and Vinh Phu Pham.

According to Akcan and Dadi, the book's power is in the essays, which when read together show how mass-enforced displacement emerges from these cases not as a pathology specific to the Middle East and South Asia, but as a central policy of nation formation — a European concept and type of governmental entity that became an international norm during the decolonization processes and postwar reparations of the 20th century — which tragically resulted in new forms of violence in the world, rather than repairing the damages of colonization, WWI, or WWII.

For a complete list of contributing authors and a preview of this title, please visit the Taylor & Frances website to download a PDF.

Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination , edited by Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi is one of many recent faculty publications to be featured in AAP's annual Launchpad event on April 17, 2024. Launchpad is held in Milstein Hall and is free and open to the public. The event includes presentations by the authors as well as a reception with opportunities to peruse and purchase many of the publications.

Read the story on the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning website.

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Tips for Writing an Effective Application Essay

How to Write an Effective Essay

Writing an essay for college admission gives you a chance to use your authentic voice and show your personality. It's an excellent opportunity to personalize your application beyond your academic credentials, and a well-written essay can have a positive influence come decision time.

Want to know how to draft an essay for your college application ? Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing.

Tips for Essay Writing

A typical college application essay, also known as a personal statement, is 400-600 words. Although that may seem short, writing about yourself can be challenging. It's not something you want to rush or put off at the last moment. Think of it as a critical piece of the application process. Follow these tips to write an impactful essay that can work in your favor.

1. Start Early.

Few people write well under pressure. Try to complete your first draft a few weeks before you have to turn it in. Many advisers recommend starting as early as the summer before your senior year in high school. That way, you have ample time to think about the prompt and craft the best personal statement possible.

You don't have to work on your essay every day, but you'll want to give yourself time to revise and edit. You may discover that you want to change your topic or think of a better way to frame it. Either way, the sooner you start, the better.

2. Understand the Prompt and Instructions.

Before you begin the writing process, take time to understand what the college wants from you. The worst thing you can do is skim through the instructions and submit a piece that doesn't even fit the bare minimum requirements or address the essay topic. Look at the prompt, consider the required word count, and note any unique details each school wants.

3. Create a Strong Opener.

Students seeking help for their application essays often have trouble getting things started. It's a challenging writing process. Finding the right words to start can be the hardest part.

Spending more time working on your opener is always a good idea. The opening sentence sets the stage for the rest of your piece. The introductory paragraph is what piques the interest of the reader, and it can immediately set your essay apart from the others.

4. Stay on Topic.

One of the most important things to remember is to keep to the essay topic. If you're applying to 10 or more colleges, it's easy to veer off course with so many application essays.

A common mistake many students make is trying to fit previously written essays into the mold of another college's requirements. This seems like a time-saving way to avoid writing new pieces entirely, but it often backfires. The result is usually a final piece that's generic, unfocused, or confusing. Always write a new essay for every application, no matter how long it takes.

5. Think About Your Response.

Don't try to guess what the admissions officials want to read. Your essay will be easier to write─and more exciting to read─if you’re genuinely enthusiastic about your subject. Here’s an example: If all your friends are writing application essays about covid-19, it may be a good idea to avoid that topic, unless during the pandemic you had a vivid, life-changing experience you're burning to share. Whatever topic you choose, avoid canned responses. Be creative.

6. Focus on You.

Essay prompts typically give you plenty of latitude, but panel members expect you to focus on a subject that is personal (although not overly intimate) and particular to you. Admissions counselors say the best essays help them learn something about the candidate that they would never know from reading the rest of the application.

7. Stay True to Your Voice.

Use your usual vocabulary. Avoid fancy language you wouldn't use in real life. Imagine yourself reading this essay aloud to a classroom full of people who have never met you. Keep a confident tone. Be wary of words and phrases that undercut that tone.

8. Be Specific and Factual.

Capitalize on real-life experiences. Your essay may give you the time and space to explain why a particular achievement meant so much to you. But resist the urge to exaggerate and embellish. Admissions counselors read thousands of essays each year. They can easily spot a fake.

9. Edit and Proofread.

When you finish the final draft, run it through the spell checker on your computer. Then don’t read your essay for a few days. You'll be more apt to spot typos and awkward grammar when you reread it. After that, ask a teacher, parent, or college student (preferably an English or communications major) to give it a quick read. While you're at it, double-check your word count.

Writing essays for college admission can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be. A well-crafted essay could be the deciding factor─in your favor. Keep these tips in mind, and you'll have no problem creating memorable pieces for every application.

What is the format of a college application essay?

Generally, essays for college admission follow a simple format that includes an opening paragraph, a lengthier body section, and a closing paragraph. You don't need to include a title, which will only take up extra space. Keep in mind that the exact format can vary from one college application to the next. Read the instructions and prompt for more guidance.

Most online applications will include a text box for your essay. If you're attaching it as a document, however, be sure to use a standard, 12-point font and use 1.5-spaced or double-spaced lines, unless the application specifies different font and spacing.

How do you start an essay?

The goal here is to use an attention grabber. Think of it as a way to reel the reader in and interest an admissions officer in what you have to say. There's no trick on how to start a college application essay. The best way you can approach this task is to flex your creative muscles and think outside the box.

You can start with openers such as relevant quotes, exciting anecdotes, or questions. Either way, the first sentence should be unique and intrigue the reader.

What should an essay include?

Every application essay you write should include details about yourself and past experiences. It's another opportunity to make yourself look like a fantastic applicant. Leverage your experiences. Tell a riveting story that fulfills the prompt.

What shouldn’t be included in an essay?

When writing a college application essay, it's usually best to avoid overly personal details and controversial topics. Although these topics might make for an intriguing essay, they can be tricky to express well. If you’re unsure if a topic is appropriate for your essay, check with your school counselor. An essay for college admission shouldn't include a list of achievements or academic accolades either. Your essay isn’t meant to be a rehashing of information the admissions panel can find elsewhere in your application.

How can you make your essay personal and interesting?

The best way to make your essay interesting is to write about something genuinely important to you. That could be an experience that changed your life or a valuable lesson that had an enormous impact on you. Whatever the case, speak from the heart, and be honest.

Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?

Mental health struggles can create challenges you must overcome during your education and could be an opportunity for you to show how you’ve handled challenges and overcome obstacles. If you’re considering writing your essay for college admission on this topic, consider talking to your school counselor or with an English teacher on how to frame the essay.

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Isotopes hosting Jackie Robinson art and essay project

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The Albuquerque Isotopes are celebrating Jackie Robinson with an art and essay project going on now through early next month.

Students are encouraged to write an essay or create a piece of art celebrating the life of Jackie Robinson. It is open to all students, K-12.

If you turn in an essay or piece of art, students will receive four Reserved Level tickets for the Jackie Robinson Celebration game April 14 against the Sugar Land Space Cowboys.

The deadline to complete the assignment is April 12. You can drop off your completed submission at the Isotopes Park Administrative Offices, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

For more information, click here or the video above where we talked to Forest Stulting for the ‘Topes.

Oscar Wilde’s Art of Disobedience

Msn article rss.

Revisiting his critical writing, we learn a valuable lesson about the critic’s role in refusing bad taste and bad politics.

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue,” Oscar Wilde declares in his 1891 essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

Books in review

The critical writings of oscar wilde: an annotated selection.

“Classic Wilde,” you might think. Isn’t it like him to argue that the betterment of civilization depends upon misbehavior? Since his death in 1900, at the age of 46, the writer’s popular image as a provocateur has only strengthened, and not without cause. In Wilde’s oeuvre, contradiction is not merely a rhetorical attitude, but an implicit intellectual challenge. Yet as a critic and essayist, his commitment to insubordination is also entangled with a lifelong philosophical inquiry into the conundrum of creating art on one’s own terms, unburdened by the demands of public opinion or by a milieu’s prevailing aesthetic conventions. If yielding to authority was tantamount to degradation, as Wilde believed, beauty and art could flourish only in conditions of freedom, which by his own definition constituted a utopia of socialist hedonism. “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt,” he writes. Rather than brute, “unintellectual” labor, human life ought to be occupied by the sorts of activities likely to draw accusations of idleness: creative pastimes of one’s choosing or absolute contemplative leisure.

His body of criticism, newly collected in The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde , cultivates an aesthetic of disobedience. Its language—sly, limber, epigrammatic—models the same rebellious individualism that it so fiercely advocates. In this annotated volume, editor Nicholas Frankel assembles a selection of Wilde’s most famous nonfiction writing, largely devoted to the matters of how an artist creates art and how others should receive it. Frankel divides this collection into four chronologized groups: reviews, essays and dialogues, letters to the press, and epigrams and paradoxes. Together, they illuminate a swaggering intellectual career that spans not just the novel, the play, and the poem but also, to a prodigious degree, the periodical.

As Frankel suggests in his introduction, “Wilde approached the writing of criticism with wit, irony, and a consummate sense of style, so much so that his critical writing is often hardly recognizable as criticism .” This flouting of rhetorical custom may itself be understood as a subtle form of defiance: a commitment to submitting language to a laboratory experiment of Wilde’s own devising. Take, for example, the argument that human progress requires disobedience, in which he invokes the latter’s “virtue,” as if the point of his writing is to yoke opposites, arousing tension through their unexpected alliance.

Wilde was no stranger to tension, or to scandal. The chutzpah of his criticism issues from his enduring friction with the cultural habits and assumptions of late Victorian England, from his resistance to complacency within a context he found sorely wanting. Yet inside that raucous rebellion, one cannot but discern a yearning impulse: that to obey, or not, could finally diminish as relevant modes of sociality; that an individual—queer, Irish, aesthetically flamboyant—could commit himself to beauty amid the peril fomented by an anxious nation scouting out transgression on every page.

By the late 19th century, Great Britain’s literary ecosystem was populated by a roster of venerated critics: Thomas Carlyle loomed large in the field, his sway unhindered by his death in 1881. Matthew Arnold’s 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”—which Wilde would take to task 25 years later—famously champions the work of critics as crucial to literature in the wake of much public disparagement. John Ruskin and Walter Pater played crucial roles in art history and aesthetics, and each was uniquely indispensable to Wilde’s own thinking. But whatever intellectual debts Wilde owed to his critical forebears, he would not compound them through stylistic mimicry. Even the most recreational readers of Wilde could not confuse him for the author of The Stones of Venice (written by Ruskin in 1851) or Studies in the History of the Renaissance (written by Pater in 1873, and often referred to by Wilde as “my golden book”). Nor did the figure of “the critic,” chiseled in the Victorian imagination as a Carlyle-like symbol of sober wisdom, appeal to Wilde’s puckishness.

While he delighted in the role of the critic, Wilde was the first to admit his own limits. A critic cannot confer truth to his readers, nor should he attempt to do so, Wilde argued. At most, a critic can propose the terms of conversation. He implies that the power of language is essentially dialogic; it draws significance through its summoning of oppositions. Frankel delineates this impulse in Wilde’s criticism, identifying it as a proto-Bakhtinian “dialectical understanding of the truth”—an understanding that renders proof and reliability as red herrings. “No artist desires to prove anything,” Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , for “even things that are true can be proved.”

To scout out the precise coordinates of Wilde’s critical inconsistencies would be to miss his greater rhetorical point. (“Who wants to be consistent?” asks Vivian in his 1889 dialogue, “The Decay of Lying: An Observation.”) Still, his mercurial tendencies were not always choreographed. Early in his career, Wilde argued that artistic self-sufficiency existed in autonomous relation to one’s milieu. “Such an expression as English art is a meaningless expression,” he told the Royal Academy’s art students in an 1883 lecture. “Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all.” Like the Greek deities depicted in Wilde’s beloved Hellenistic sculpture, artistic sensibility is born unto the artist with inviolable sanctity; it is a tidy, closed system, he suggests, dependent only upon itself.

Yet within two years’ time, Wilde changed his mind and began to acknowledge, even to insist upon the significance of cultural context. “An artist is not an isolated fact,” he writes in “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (1885), a withering review of the American painter’s lecture on aestheticism; “he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle.” Wilde had once counted James McNeil Whistler among his friends, but the affection between them soured as Wilde’s views shifted to an irreconcilably opposing position. One blistering point of contention regarded the critic’s role in artistic discourse. In his lecture, Whistler laments the scourge of criticism, condemning its practitioners as “the middleman in this matter on Art.” Criticism, in Whistler’s estimation, amounts to little more than static interference: “It has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture.”

The Nation Weekly

Wilde saw the matter differently. He also knew that Whistler had long harbored a grudge against Victorian critics. In 1878, Whistler had filed a libel suit against Ruskin for a mean review. The artist won the case, although the jury conveyed its disdain for the proceedings by awarding him only a farthing in damages. Nonetheless, as Frankel writes in his introduction, the ruling in such a public case imperiled the critic’s “hitherto unquestioned authority.” The case implied the triumph of the artist over the critic, which is a constant conflict that still produces a thorny question: Why should critics possess the authority to critique art they did not create?

Wilde pokes at this question in “Mr. Whistler’s 10 O’Clock” and attempts to settle it through a shift in vocabulary: “I say that only an artist is a judge of art…. For there are not many arts, but one art merely: poem, picture and Parthenon, sonnet and statue…he who knows one knows all.” This statement foreshadows a more explicit moment of philosophical departure, in which Wilde demands criticism’s recognition as an aesthetic equivalent to other artistic forms. Even Matthew Arnold, one of criticism’s most famous defenders, had declined to make this leap: “The critical power is of lower rank than the inventive,” he admitted. Arnold’s critic does not create art but instead evaluates, assembles, organizes.

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Although an admirer of Arnold, Wilde could not abide what seemed to him a diminishing of the critic’s role. A critic was no mere lens by which to reflect a superior creation, nor a pale imitation of literary artistry. The cultural contributions made by critics warranted appreciation on their own terms. Wilde issued his own apologia in 1890 by way of his famous dialogue, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing.” Initially titled “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” it delivers a pointed refutation of Arnold’s thesis.

The conversation unfolds between Wilde’s slick, in-dialogue proxy, Gilbert, and his skeptical interlocutor, Ernest, who feeds Gilbert a handy supply of queries and protestations that incite his elaboration on the art of criticism. “You seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far,” Ernest protests. “For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.” Gilbert, who shares the author’s love of sly contradiction, is prepared for this moment, epigrams loaded in his quiver: “Not at all. That is a gross popular error…. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it…. [Action] is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

Here is a defense of criticism that refuses all prior terms and is shaped instead by Wilde’s own pleasure-centered metric. Loath to accommodate an industrializing empire’s fetish for productivity, he casts the writing of criticism in opposition to exertion of any sort. As Gilbert and Ernest debate, they gaze at the night sky, where “the moon…gleams like a lion’s eye”; Egyptian cigarettes dangle from their fingers. As Frankel notes in his introduction, “The critic is an artist, to be sure, but he is also a corporeal creature, whose thoughts and ideas are extensions of his physical life, not a repudiation of it.” In the domain of Wilde’s dialogues, his speakers are at liberty to enact the conditions that Wilde understands as central to creative work. If it is the critical instinct, not the creative one, that breeds innovation, then the critic requires the stillness afforded by “doing nothing”—by settling into one’s flesh and heeding one’s own impressions, wherever they meander.

Gilbert’s position in “The Critic as Artist” is seductive, but it courts disagreement. When I’ve read this dialogue in the past, my reactions have sometimes eked into Ernest territory. One could dispense with Arnold’s solemn distinction between critical and creative abilities without landing where Wilde does. But why would one read Wilde in pursuit of intellectual mitigations? Rather, one turns to him because the extravagance of his theories begets the most enthralling possibilities. Or as Gilbert concludes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.”

There are a few peculiar lines at the conclusion of Wilde’s 1885 essay, “The Truth of Masks: A Note on Illusion,” in which he offers a sly disclaimer to the argument he would make five years later:

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything.

The critic shoulders many artistic and intellectual responsibilities, but always saying precisely what one believes is not among them. As the essay’s title implies, a writerly posture—a linguistic mask—might signify more than any so-called authentic claim. Performance, Wilde knew, was a reliably tangible fact of existence; another person’s truth was a glint on the horizon, easily contested and endlessly deferred.

In April 1895, during Wilde’s failed libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, he was questioned about a line in his series of epigrams, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1894): “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes it.” Wilde explained that according to his “philosophical definition,” truth was “something so personal…that in fact the same truth can never be apprehended by two minds.” The court could not abide such vast ideological diversity, particularly when posited by a man who, soon after, would be convicted of gross indecency for homosexuality. Wilde’s truth—and his adherence to it—yielded criminal condemnation and punishment: It signified an illicit, unpardonable refusal.

In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde also invokes the matter of necessary disobedience, although he draws on more strident language than he does in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress,” Gilbert declares. But lest the reader misinterpret the remark as equivocal, he presses the point: “Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless…. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.” Perhaps these lines comprise a kind of beatitude, uttered for those who, like Wilde, resisted impossible assimilatory demands. Or perhaps they’re a nudge to the docile reader: The only route to Utopia is illuminated by disobedience.