What Good Are the Arts? , John Carey
What Good Are the Arts? - John Carey, Faber and Faber Ltd, 204 pages (June 2, 2005). ISBN: 571226027
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John Carey is the former Merton Professor of English at Oxford, the highest literary academic post in Britain. He's now an art critic for the Sunday Times and the BBC, and has written many other books including Literature and the Masses. In What Good Are the Arts? Carey cuts through obscurity and fallacious reasoning in answers to questions like: What Is a Work of Art? Is High Art Superior? Can Science Help? Do the Arts Make Us Better? Can Art Be a Religion? His answers are: anything; no; not much; not usually; no.
In the early chapters, John Carey attacks attempts by others to answer the question "what good are the arts?" He calls Kant's "art is great works" conclusion a “farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion”, and dismisses the elitist Jeannette Winterson’s musings as "barely sane". Chris Smith in pushing an ecstatic appreciation of high art while admitting tolerance of popular art, is dismissed as spewing “banal and evasive claptrap”. John Carey suggests we cannot pronounce any other person's aesthetic judgments right or wrong. He hopes that other people will be convinced by his criticism — but this is an act of persuasion, not scientific proof.
One of John Carey's most admired books is his edited collection of scientific writing — The Faber Book of Science. He uses his knowledge of science to explore the efforts of biologists, neurologists and evolutionary psychologists to explore what good are the arts. These, he suggests, run aground on the unsolved problem of consciousness.
John Carey takes the question what good are the arts? literally by asking if art makes us better human beings. The patronising and self-serving snobbery of opera buffs, and the subsidy of their art by our taxes, is attacked by Carey, who points out that leading Nazis indulged in high culture while perpetrating the holocaust. George Steiner suggested that art has no secular justification — it was a religious activity providing immortality. Carey responds, “talk of the immortality of art, in the absence of a belief in God, is childish and self-deceiving”. He does find demonstrated benefit of art for the relief of depressives and reformation of criminals — but politicians are not funding such schemes.
Carey finishes by presenting a Case for Literature, which can criticize itself and everything else (the Nazi's mostly cultivated non-verbal art).
- What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey is a shrewd, witty and economical investigation of what the arts may be good for, if anything.