What Is a Real Work of Art?
Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Karl Ove Knausgaard on difference between ‘great’ and ‘tasteless’ art.
In 1916, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brönte, Virginia Woolf, then a writer for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote about what makes something ‘a real work of art’:
There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common.
At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season.
To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.
For Woolf, ‘the real work of art’ moves you, and makes you think over and over again and each time you interact with it you feel ‘a sap of life’ that runs in their leaves.
In the same decade of the 20th-century, three hundred miles away from Woolf, a young German journalist Walter Benjamin inadvertently expanded on Woolf’s thought of what makes ‘a real work of art’.
