Art records of human history. It is part of the society. Every piece of artwork contains the artist's life. Artworks are the translation of artists experience. Artists express their emotion, feeling, and thoughts into images, words, or any other types of media. The arts tell the stories of the artists' world and transmit the feeling of experience to the audience.
In Tolstoy's essay, he mention in order to call an art an "art", the art must evoke other people's feeling or emotion. Experience is the key factor of how "infection" sustain. Each person has different experience to other and feel different as well. It becomes controversial if we think backward - how to determine an art is not an art while Tolstoy mentioned "even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art." The question becomes more interesting and complicate as well because today there are more and more new types of art presented in different medias which is different further than drawing and painting. In my opinion, the word art means different in different perspective thus everyone sees thing differently.
One thing that bothers me, when I think more about the relationship of the sincerity of artworks' infection. That's say an artist's work is printed on a cup and mass produced. The artwork can still be counted as an art because audience can feel the artist's effort, but does the cup can be count as an art piece when the artwork stays on the cup or it is just another mass produce product?
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One interesting experience of new types of media of art: one of my teacher, Kirk Peterson once took bunches of note papers and paste them together to form a huge heart. It looks like a big heart form by random trash papers from far distance, but he asked people to write "love" in various different languages which makes this work much more sense and meaningful. It is very new and interesting ideas and it successfully to evoke audiences' emotion because of the emotion, love and second, it is form by each audience's known language.
I enjoyed your introductory remarks on what art should do and what should be considered an art object. I also agree that the idea of "working backwards" in order to ascertain whether a work of art qualifies as art is a thorny enterprise. Your example of the mass produced object is an excellent one in this respect. I am intrigued by the example you bring in at the end. How does this complicate the above discussion?
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