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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’.
Benjamin elaborated Woolf’s idea by declaring, as philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger writes in his recent book Time of Magicians, that ‘each great work of art contains self-consciousness’.
What does he mean by this?
In the same way as all of us have a special ability to ‘think about our thinking’, or, in other words, to have ‘thoughts about our own thoughts’, so can great works of art. The great works of art can also reflect upon their message and meaning, but to do this they need art critic, in the same way as our thoughts need our consciousness for their interpretation.
I know, the twentieth-century philosophers like Benjamin were not famous for expressing their ideas clearly and simply. What is important, however, is that Benjamin was inadvertently agreeing with Woolf’s idea that one can think about great…
