What Good Are the Arts? [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This little book has caused a bit of a stir in England. It's easy to see why. Carey mercilessly skewers the facile pieties of the art world and it's a good thing, too. Despite the title of the book, he doesn't offer any real answers to his question, except perhaps in the case of art programs in prisons. This fact doesn't bother me. What's important is that we get to the place where it is acceptable for people to ask the question at all. Unfortunately, too often the importance of the arts is taken for granted, all the better for the people who have no patience or skill in dealing with impertinent dimwits who even have to or dare to ask. The arts have their own version of the question, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it." If you have to ask what are the arts good for, well, you're just not the kind of person who will ever get it so we don't have to give you an answer. Unfortunately, the kinds of things art might actually be good for are probably not the kinds of things the arts community would want it to be good for. If art is just something that can make people feel good about themselves, it's difficult to see how it performs a function different from any number of other things that people do to feel useful and fulfilled. Carey demonstrates, as George Steiner has elsewhere, that art does not make us better people, or not necessarily so. It certainly doesn't make art producers better people, as an acquaintance with the biographies of many artists will show you unless you imagines that without art they would have been even worse. Put simply, one is left with the impression that art is either entertainment or something that can't be explained in sensible terms but which dwells on some higher plane beyond the petty demands of human comprehension.

When Carey gets around to making the case for literature the book becomes, in my opinion, slightly less interesting. It's remains a five-star book overall but I found the case for literature less compelling. If he wanted to present literature as good for something in itself then he seems to contradict the argument in the first section of the book. If he was simply comparing it to other art forms then I think he has more of a case. Literature works because it uses language, the tool we use to make intelligible arguments and understand the world. Literature can comment on itself and be understood to do so in ways that music and visual art cannot. Music and the visual arts, however enjoyable they may be, do not work the same way as language. When we try to understand and explain music and the visual arts we always do so in linguistic terms, as Carey points out. Literature works in the same medium as thought. No one discusses music by humming or art by drawing, but we can talk about literature in exactly the same way we read and write it. Less is lost in translation.

This book should be widely read whether one ends up loving it or hating it, and I suspect opinion will be so black-and-white. If you cannot bear the thought that the arts are less than untouchable, that they should not even be examined in this way, then you'll probably hate this book. If you think the arts are worth your while just because you enjoy them for something less than exalted or elitist reasons, then you might find this a more enjoyable read. (It is certainly very funny.) Either way, we should all dare to think about it.

Has Mr. Carey ever tried to make a work of art?

His approach resembles that of a space alien, reporting about human food for those on his home planet. What is this stuff the humans call food? Given its multiple shapes, temperatures, forms, sources and uses, how can it be given a single, static definition? Is there a difference between cuisine, food and mere nutrients? Are the sensory experiences of the millions eaters so varied and ineffable that they can never really be known?

The humans build virtual temples for the experiencing of food - indeed, every residence, however humble, has such a shrine. Its like a religion with them. High priests of food practice haute cuisine. But how can these humans say that the fast food diner's experience is less fulfilling than that of someone dining at the Ritz?

You basically have the whole book now. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed it. This despite (or, alas, perhaps because of) the fact that it would be reduced to a mere pamphlet if you excised all of its snide snoberries and very unsubtle put-downs.

The parrallels continue. As with food, people will sometimes pretend to like what they don't, because it is socially expedient. And people will also deny or conceal their true tastes when these are not socially acceptable. Some eat what others would call garbage. The food of other cultures may fail to attract our appetites. And we all know that people will sometimes pay crazy prices for food, and this is generally done for other reasons than pure connoiseurship.

Of course, A book entitled "What Good is Food?" would be ridiculous.

Like food, art can be repressed, supressed, outlawed, ridiculed or even badly produced. If people are hungry enough, they'll still find it and eat it. Art is the food of the soul which we don't belive in anymore, but which we feed nonetheless. Mr. Carey stands at two removes from the feast, a critic of critics. One suspects he must be hungry.

This book is actually an apologia for literature - and the literature of 'the canon' (which, one must admit, is the proper study of an Oxford professor of literature). Of course, this defence is inspired - and necessitated - by the assaults on the canon in all the arts by the post-modernist/post-structuralist academics who have stuffed (in both senses of the term) the tertiary institutions in recent years.

But, this only occurs in the second part of the book. In the first, Carey performs a richly-deserved hatchet job on aesthetics - in particular, the concept of taste, which he justly characterizes as 18th-century middle-class gentlemen's values and, therefore, anything but universal. He has little to say about music and he is less than charitable to visual art, but his opinions have largely been formed by reading the masses of inanities that have been written about the conceptual variety. His criticism of the 'modern British' art of the likes of Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst is devastating, yet fair.

Literature, on the other hand, is lauded for its unique qualities of discussion and communication, even when it deals in the romantic, irrational and imaginative. Also, it is the only medium of rational criticism - including of literature itself. And Carey goes on to prove this with eminently professorial mini lectures on writers from the canon.

Of necessity, Carey must enter the fraught field of the definition of art. The most recent published statement - that of Arthur C Danto: that art must be anything that has been accepted by 'the art world' to be so - Carey finds not broad enough. He posits instead that art is anything that anyone has ever considered to be art. While this seems to be the reductio ad absurdum, it helps Carey make his major point that, as there are no absolute values in the arts, we cannot justly condemn anyone else's point of view about art. How he justifies this with his criticism of those who regard themselves as superior to the general run because they understand the arts - and with the very concept of a canon - is not clear, however.

People who understand and appreciate the arts had to work on it (as Carey himself clearly has). Understanding and appreciating the arts is like working one's way through the stages of a secret society or lodge, so it can be difficult for those at the lower stages to appreciate what those who have 'done the hard yard' do. This may be regarded as 'elitism;, but 'elitist' is never applied pejoratively to the initiated in sport, business or religion - only the arts!

What Art Is - and Isn't: An Aesthetic Tract