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

Title & Author:	What Good Are the Arts? John Carey
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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 and Pure Pleasure. In What Good Are the Arts? Carey cuts through obscurity in providing blunt answers to blunt questions. To the question "What Is a Work of Art?", he answers, "Anything!". To the question, "Is High Art Superior?", he answers, "No!".

In the early chapters, John Carey attacks others' attempts answer the question: "what good are the arts?"  Kant suggests that, "Art is great works". But John Carey attacks this high-flown conclusion as a “farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion”. He goes further in dismissing Jeannette Winterson’s similarly elitist musings by calling them "barely sane". I was wondering why they no longer appeared on the couch together on Newsnight Review. 

He's probably not getting many invites to New Labour functions, either, as he dismisses Chris Smith's pallid views in no less vociferous terms. He suggests that Smith's avid proselytising for an ecstatic appreciation of high art, while admitting tolerance of popular art, is a spewing of, “banal and evasive claptrap”. 

John Carey is not just attempting to answer the question, "what good are the arts?", but also the more general (and interesting) question: "what is art?" He suggests that, in attempting to answer this latter question, 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. Spanning the two cultures, 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? most seriously when he asks 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. He points out that leading Nazis indulged in high culture while perpetrating the holocaust. George Steiner suggested that art has no secular justification, for him, it is a religious activity that gives us some kind of purchase on 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 concludes his excellent and thought provoking book by presenting the Case for Literature as the supreme art. It gains this title, he suggests, because it has the ability to criticize itself and everything else. Music and paintings may provide great aesthetic pleasure, but they cannot comment on themselves and this pleasure. Literature can do this. Through reading Shakespeare or Proust you can enjoy the direct aesthetic pleasure of great figurative art, while being told why it is such a pleasure, and (at the same time) be given instructions on how you might enhance your enjoyment of this highest pleasure. Can anything get better than that?

Review of reviews: John Carey's ideas on What Good Are the Arts? considered by Morrison and Lodge

David Lodge, in the Sunday Times, sees John Carey as, "that rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly, wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects in a style that non-specialists can understand and appreciate." He sees him as wielding a machete to cut through obscurity, pretension, fallacious reasoning and unsupported assertion of the likes of Kant and Winterson.

Lodge suggests Carey goes too far in forbidding us to pronounce on other people’s aesthetic judgments. But, surely, Lodge is wrong about this, or at least doesn't finesse the argument as Carey does. Carey is not forbidding us to pronounce, just forbidding us to make absolute statements. We can all say what we like, and argue for what we want, but we cannot claim an absolute certainty for our views. 

Lodge concludes: "You only have to imagine the dreariness of a world without art to know that it is a good thing. The problem is to explain how and why in terms that apply to all the arts. Carey rightly points out that anything (e.g., a urinal) can be a work of art if someone chooses to regard it aesthetically (e.g., by putting it in an art gallery). There are however some things ... that are works of art because there is nothing else for them to be ... this means that systematic aesthetics is not necessarily such a vain pursuit as Carey implies." In this, I think Lodge is wrong and Carey is right. Artists are forever creating objects that escape from the system, the urinal is only one example. Maybe Lodge is locked into the system of writing Victorian novels, which is a highly lucrative niche, but maybe his praise for system reflects a subconscious desire for experiment?

Blake Morrison also enjoyed John Carey's investigation of What Good Are the Arts? He starts by suggesting that we all feel the arts are good for us somehow. But, as militant critic sine qua non, he slams Thatcher and Blair for supporting arts simply because they make a profit. In the same breath he slams Hitler for using art as a mask for atrocity. This is all "very Morrison" and, indeed, all "very Carey", and (indeed) "all good stuff". Morrison repeats some of Carey's quotes to highlight how megalomaniacs have used art to justify themselves, for example, Hitler: "Really outstanding geniuses permit themselves no concern for normal human beings"; Clive Bell: "All artists are aristocrats ... Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity?"

Morrison, the guy who has successfully taken poetry and biography to today's industrial masses, admires Carey's account of pre-industrial societies spreading art to the whole community. Indeed, though neither point this out, Shakespeare directed his work at much at groundlings as aristocrats. But Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, took art to only be good insofar as it accessed a "supersensible" realm of beauty and truth that only "geniuses" were capable of accessing. Kantians thought groundlings could never appreciate art.

Morrison stresses Carey's stress that this view of art dominated Romanticism and Modernism. Morrison also lets Jeanette Winterson have it, with both barrels, through Carey's account of her self-professed "superior taste" over her mother's preference for the "hideous" and "factory-made". (But her mother knew the Bible better than her. That must have really stuck in her canonical, elitist craw!)

Morrison likes Carey's inclusive "anything can be art" and "no one can say what's art" approach. He also goes along with Carey's view in dismissing the idea that art grants us a "vision of spiritual truth". This is dismissed by these secular chaps as reducing art to an ecstasy pill.

But Carey thinks that art can do some good. For instance, pointing to the novelist DBC Pierre who decided not to kill himself after hearing a symphony, and the benefits art has brought to depressed prisoners. Morrison rightly points out that Carey could have said a lot more here, perhaps about art in hospitals and "bibliotherapy". Bur Morrison could also have said more here, perhaps pointing to other critics, like Harold Bloom, who have stressed this aspect of art for helping us to "develop the self" and to live with ourselves in solitude, and in the face of death.

Morrison thinks Carey sometimes misses the mark, on both sides, in the battle of the "little man against the big shots". He thinks he's unfair to opera and conceptual art; but, on the other hand, doesn't give film and television their due (along with literature) as stimuli to the moral imagination. But, like Lodge, Morrison is mostly appreciative of this excellent book. He suggests it even rivals Tom Paulin and Terry Eagleton at their best.  I cannot but agree! He finishes with an excellent suggestion for the future of John Carey: "Next time the post of chair of the Arts Council becomes vacant, someone ought to nominate him." Great idea! Then Carey will not only get to ask the question What Good Are the Arts?, but to provide some answers to it that are based on a sound, common-sense philosophy.