Madison’s Reviews > What Is Art? > Status Update

"The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were him own and not someone's else's-as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express"

Chapter 12 explains how professionalism & art criticism encourage counterfeit art. Critics work to explain art into infectiousness. "Had it been possible to explain in words what he wished to convey, the artist would have expressed himself in words."

"So that the favorite argument... that in order to feel art one has to first understand it (which really only means habituate oneself to it), is the truest indication that what we are asked to understand by such method is either very bad, exclusive art, or is not art at all"

Really interested in the relationship the working class has with art (which is actually no relationship)

"The remaining 99% live and die, generation after generation, crushed by toil, and never tasting this art which, moreover, is of such a nature that, if they could get it, they would not understand anything"

"...fine art can arise only on the slavery of the masses of people"

art is historically a "pastime" for the rich

Agree with not defining art in terms of beauty/pleasure. Interested in the idea that when there are no aesthetic standards/definition of what art is the upper classes create theories to explain/sanction them. "Thus what is considered the definition of art is no definition at all, but only a shuffle to justify existing art"