Reviews for What Good Are the Arts?

The average rating for What Good Are the Arts? based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-26 00:00:00 Robert Oberhofer In the first place, this book has the wrong title. It should be called 'How Sacred Are The Arts?', because that's the question Oxford Professor of English Literature John Carey spends most of his time trying to answer. It's not surprising, therefore, that Professor Carey and his publishers went with something more punchy. Another possible title would be 'How Good Do Other People Think The Arts Are?', because the more you read this book, the more you realise that Oxford Professor of English Literature John Carey is apparently neither willing nor able to grapple with the fundamental question that his book title poses. Instead, he prefers to quote other people's attempts to do so, and passes verdict on them. In the end, it's difficult to tell exactly what good Professor Carey thinks the arts are. He doesn't seem to be very interested in them, and perhaps I'm just naively trustful that a professional educator in such a senior position would be more enthusiastic about the arts in general, but that does seem like quite a surprising attitude for an Oxford Professor of English Literature to have. What's maybe more understandable is that he knows little about anything other than literature, and what he knows about literature is confined a very narrow field indeed: the last 150 years or so of English literature. I say 'English literature' because I mean writing by English people; he seems to be largely uninterested in American literature, or the literature of the former English colonies. So okay, he's a specialist, but does that mean he's unqualified to make grand sweeping statements about the good of the arts as a whole? Maybe he has some hitherto unexpressed talent for brilliant generalisation, a capacity to make large arguments about complex subjects with insight and explanatory power? No. The art critic Matthew Collings, who was one of this book's very few negative reviewers, characterised it cruelly but amusingly as 'taxi driver bollocks'. I disagree with this assessment insofar as I once had a long and fascinating conversation with a taxi driver about the jazz musician Eric Dolphy, which goes to show that you can never tell merely from somebody's job what they know about the arts. This, however, is a conversation that Professor Carey can't imagine anyone having. Part of his whole argument goes like this: over here, there is a small elite of poncy high-art fans who only look at great paintings and only read classic literature and who talk mostly pernicious nonsense about those things, and we should stop listening to their nonsense; while over there, there is a whole bunch of 'masses' who aren't interested in high art at all but who only watch cheap TV, but we ought nevertheless to respect their ignorance of the classics, and accept that the stuff they are interested in -- like soap operas -- is actually fascinating, relevant and important. And, by the way, these are the only two types of people there are. (Apart from Professor Carey himself, who presumably falls into neither category.) It's a sign of how out-of-touch Professor Carey is with the art that these 'masses' enjoy that he assumes that the dominant kind of mass culture in 2005 (when he wrote the book) is the soap opera; at that time, the UK version of Big Brother was in its sixth season, and The X Factor was already attracting more viewers than either BB or EastEnders. But Professor Carey makes no mention of reality television. So, Professor Carey isn't himself really interested in the mass culture that he claims people ought to be interested in, and yet he thinks that the 'masses' who, he thinks, like that stuff and nothing else, are in some way to be praised for not liking 'serious' or 'high' art. He is convinced that the 'masses' are entirely unable to appreciate 'high' art, and that not only is that not a problem, but it's as it should be. It doesn't seem to occur to him that the 'masses' are made up of individuals, many of whom are willing or able to watch things other than soap operas (or The X Factor) and listen to things other than whatever's on BBC Radio 1. No, as far as he's concerned, most people need to be left exactly where they are. This, you may think, is a very strange position for an educator in his position to take; shouldn't he have decades of experience of introducing people to the pleasures and virtues and power of art? But apparently, several decades of teaching English at Oxford have taken their toll on the Professor, because he seems to have very little sense of these pleasures and virtues and powers. He finds it very hard to imagine that a blue-collar worker might sometimes stick on a bit of Mozart because he or she likes the sound of it, or for that matter, that a classically-trained musician might sometimes want to veg out in front of the TV. Some art critics are roaring snobs, but Professor Carey would have us believe that to be an art critic at all is to be a roaring snob. Of course, there are levels of involvement with the arts, and compilations with titles like Essential Classics or The Mozart Collection are still bought by people who'd probably not bother to go to a recital by Mitsuko Uchida. But Professor Carey appears to believe that an appreciation of anything more complex than a TV soap opera is something that you can only expect from people who've had a university education. He made a similar argument in his earlier book The Intellectuals and the Masses, in which he claimed that Joyce's Ulysses is a deeply elitist book because its central character, Leopold Bloom, would be quite unable to understand or enjoy it. This is because Bloom, according to the Professor, is 'not an intellectual'. This is in spite of the fact that Bloom is presented as a profoundly-middle class figure: he enjoys reading fiction, as well as non-fiction books about the arts and sciences, and has his own opinions about them; he's thought of by his acquaintances as being a 'cultured all-round man' who has 'a touch of the artist'; and in fact he's described as producing culture himself, having co-written a satirical song for a public entertainment. More than once, like many an attendee of a modern book group, he has ideas for short stories that he'll probably never write. Moreover, Bloom craves to broaden his intellectual horizons; it's part of the reason why he wants to hang out with the hyper-intellectual Stephen. But to the Professor, Bloom's active and inquiring mind is presumably just a sad pretension to intelligence, because Bloom is just an advertising salesman and not a university graduate. So maybe the Professor does believe in education after all, just not the Open University. I could tell the Professor that I myself was reading and enjoying Joyce in my teens, and although I've now read Ulysses three times in total and bits of it many times more, I've still not studied English literature at university level, but presumably he would counter that I only thought I was enjoying it, and I only think I'm getting the allusions and appreciating the multi-layered nature of Joyce's achievement, but I'm not really doing any of these things; I'm just kidding myself, because I haven't been to his tutorials. In which case, I don't think I have anything to learn from his tutorials. Besides his inability to make fine distinctions between different ways of appreciating art, there is also Professor Carey's ignorance of the art he's talking about. For example, he appears to believe that Warhol's soup cans were actual cans that Warhol bought and exhibited in a gallery, as opposed to paintings of cans, thereby missing the entire point of what Warhol was doing with the Western tradition of painting (and also conflating Warhol with Duchamp -- oh, they're all the same, these modernist chaps). He almost never talks about music at all; what about jazz, which flickers problematically between being a popular art and a 'high' one? Jazz severely screws up Carey's whole thesis, so in a way it's not surprising that he never mentions it; his main references to music are to Bob Dylan and Beethoven. Dylan and Beethoven are of course established classics in their respective fields, although Carey -- rather in the manner of someone who's only just dusted off that review copy of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin that he got sent all those years ago -- appears to regard Dylan as a contemporary pop singer who we are only beginning to realise is actually rather good. Here, as elsewhere, he's decades behind the times, and is perpetuating the very hierarchies that he professes to deplore. He argues -- no, wait, I can't dignify it by calling it an argument, he asserts -- that music and the visual arts are only capable of offering 'delight', and can't offer instruction, reflection, or criticism, all of which properties he claims are things that can only be done within literature. Well, okay; so he can't tell how, as John Berger has pointed out, Rembrandt's late work turns the entire tradition of oil painting against itself. And I guess he's never listened to a symphony by Shostakovich, or even by Mahler, because otherwise he would be able to understand how music can contain irony and reflection; in fact, maybe the only Beethoven he's listened to is the 9th Symphony, because the late quartets screw up his argument too. To go back further, a motet by Lassus (Cum essen parvulus, for example) beautifully illustrates within music the ideas contained in the text, further proof that music has been capable of reflection since the 16th century, whether Professor Carey is aware of it or not. As for instruction, anybody who can listen to Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper and tell me that the music has no moral purpose but is solely for 'delight' is simply a person with tin ears. Elsewhere, he resorts to the kind of argument typical of drunk first year students after their first philosophy tutorial. For example, in the course of attempting to demolish the notion that the 'art-world' has any authority to determine what is art and what is not, he brings up a peculiar thought experiment in which Picasso paints a necktie and so does a small girl. Carey argues that the establishment art-critical position, in which Picasso's necktie is a work of art but the small girl's isn't, is based on some sort of quasi-religious argument in which the 'art-world' takes its own authority to be transcendent and unquestionable, etc. etc. But this is moonshine compared to the materialist position that the Picasso necktie picture is an artwork by virtue of Picasso' established position in the art market, whereas the small girl's necktie picture is not an artwork as long as nobody wants to pay any money for it and as long as no major critic wants to treat it as such. The Professor's argument that the authority of art critics is basically unreal is worth unpicking, because it goes to show why TV producers were willing for so long to put him on telly. It's because Professor Carey performs a service that's extremely useful to what for want of a better word I'll call, after Guy Debord, the Spectacle: he can be relied upon to be amusingly provocative ('amusingly' if, that is, you don't care what's at stake) but also to never take the difficult but necessary path in any argument about the state of the culture industry, which is to follow the money. The truth is, art critics don't get to decide what is and isn't art. They get to pass judgment on what's put in front of them, but most of them don't try to confer 'art' status on things that aren't art. They are much more likely to claim that something that has been hailed as art isn't art at all, but they're still not very likely to do that either, and for good reasons. The process works like this: publications research information about art exhibitions in different art galleries and exhibition spaces, and they convey the information to the public according to criteria of 'notability'. They don't all want to know about every possible manifestation of artistic activity in the areas that they cover. They might aspire to cover everything, but that would be an impossible task -- they can't list information about every last P1-level art exhibition in every school open day, for example. Why? Because to pay staff to research and publish such things would massively increase the workload, with no real payoff to the publication. A primary school, unlike an art gallery, doesn't have money in its budget to advertise itself in the art pages of publications and websites -- unless it's an unbelievably rich and famous primary school with a renowned visual arts program, and maybe not even then. So the publication selects from the information available, letting junior staff and subeditors choose the most 'notable' or 'interesting-sounding' stuff to be highlights, and quietly omitting mention of the least interesting. How do they decide what's interesting and what's not? From some special quasi-religious knowledge of what 'is' and 'isn't' art? Nothing so hifalutin. Staff are recruited according to certain criteria, and they stay in employment if they hold up the standard that the publication expects. Typical criteria would be 'Put it in if it's the kind of thing you'd advise your friends to go and see', but also 'Put it in if it's a big gallery'. Here we can see the self-reinforcing nature of how the art industry works: prestige reinforces itself. Another and possibly bigger factor, although it's seldom articulated, is that the publication very likely gets most of its income from advertising. If it were to start telling its readers about things that its ideal readership would likely consider boring or irrelevant or entirely incongruous (like a notice about some guy sticking a picture by his kid on his kitchen wall), the readers will stop reading. And if circulation goes down, it becomes harder to sell ads, because who wants to spend money on an ad in a publication nobody reads? And so the publication goes out of business. So prestige breeds prestige; it's in the interests of both the publication and the advertisers to focus on the biggest, most prestigious events, even if it's not in the interests of the artists or the readers. Fine, but what confers prestige on an arts organisation in the first place? A consistent record of curating art that people want to experience. Of course, some arts organisations can go on offering mediocre work and people keep going, because people get attached to the prestige rather than responding directly to the art, but exactly the same thing happens in all art organisations. Of all people, Oxford Professor of English Literature John Carey should be aware of the numberless hordes who've struggled to finish fat Victorian novels out of a joyless sense of cultural duty. So prestigious shows get covered because it would be financially senseless for publications to not cover them, and since they can't cover everything, the non-prestigious stuff gets dropped for reasons of space, time and cost. This goes to show that it's quite easy for artistic value to be created and upheld without any reference to impossibly subjective questions like 'Is this art greater or lesser than that art?' Professor Carey tries to deny the authority of the art-world, in the manner of someone denying that the police have any authority to arrest him: that's all very well, but try putting the stuff in a gallery (or heaving a brick through the police station window) and see how far it gets you. Carey achieves a kind of ideally vacuous non-argument shortly afterwards; he imagines the father protesting that the kid's necktie is an artwork 'for him', and the art critic denying it on the grounds that the art critic's experience is much deeper and more meaningful than the father's. This is not an argument that any professional art critic would ever make, but Professor Carey nevertheless attempts to refute it on the utterly bizarre grounds that the critic is wrong, because 'we have no means of knowing the inner experience of other people and therefore no means of judging the kind of pleasure they get from whatever happens to give them pleasure'. To this, it can only be replied that Professor Carey is being either deliberately disingenuous or plain stupid, because we do have a means of knowing the inner experience of other people, and it's called language. In fact, there is a somewhat more complex, sensual and involved way of knowing the inner experience of other people, and it's called art. If art is not about sharing experience, it's not about anything at all, but nowhere in this book does Carey suggest that his conception of art, whatever it is (because he doesn't ever spell it out), has anything to do with sharing experience. From this, I can only conclude that somebody, like him, who doesn't even know what art is, is not qualified to write a book about its value. I am amazed that this book got commissioned, let alone published. I'm also kind of disgusted with Faber & Faber for allowing it to remain in print, and as a mature student I am very, very glad that I have never studied English literature at Oxford under the tutelage of Professor John Carey. Who would want to be taught about literature by a supposed educator who thinks that the arts are nothing but a way for making snobs feel good about themselves? I can't imagine anything more empty, more stupid and more contemptuous of the very notion of education.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-04 00:00:00 James M. Keane Am I really a better person for having wandered around art museums, and having sat through symphonies, and having read a few classics? Does spending an afternoon staring at Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" give me character and depth? Or does it just make me feel superior to the people who prefer Archie comics and video games? John Carey asks some really interesting questions. I don't agree with everything he says, but I like the questions. Why haven't more writers addressed this topic? I'd recommend this book to anyone wanting to challenge their perceptions about art.