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What Good are the Arts?
From one of the country's most eminent reviewers and academics, a delightfully sceptical and devastatingly intelligent assessment of the true value of art.
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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May 27, 2013
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.
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.
May 1, 2010
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.
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.
August 7, 2021
Zeki bir adam olduğu belli John Carey 'nin okurken yer yer sorduğu sorular ile çok zevk aldığım, verdiği alıntıları ve kitapları araştırma ihtiyacı duyduğum dolayısıyla maalesef bahsettiği bir çok şeyi bilmediğim sanat ile ilgili görüşlerin fikirlerin olduğu kitap.
Sanatla ilgili bir sürü bilgi ve hatırlatma içeren bir eser yazmış ama tek hatası bana göre konuyu çok dağıtıyor anlatmaya çalışırken ve kısmen beni sıktı okurken. Çok fazla detaylara inerek alakasız kitaplardan alıntılar ile konudan iyice uzaklaşarak kafa karıştıran ve okuma zevkini azaltan bir üslup tercih etmiş.. Gene de güzel referanslar ile bir çok şey öğreten okuduğuma memnun olduğum çalışma..
Vakıfbank Yayınlarına da değinmeden olmaz, çok kaliteli baskısı, sayfa kalitesi kapak tasarımı ve seçtikleri kitaplar ile çok başarılı işler yapıyor kutlamak takdir etmek lazım..
**
" Avustralyalı eleştirmen Robert Hughes, eşitsizlik ve sosyal adaletsizlik yüzünden deliren Ressam Van Gogh'un acı dolu tanıklığının ifadesini yansıtan bir tablosunu bir milyonerin misafir odasında asılı görmenin insanda tiksinti yarattığı söylerken genel bir rahatsızlığı dillendirmektedir. "
**
" Adam Philips in Houdini's box kitabında öne sürdüğü gbi, hepimiz kaçan sanatçılarız çünkü istediğimiz hayat istemediğimiz şeylerden kaçmaya bağlıdır. "
Sanatla ilgili bir sürü bilgi ve hatırlatma içeren bir eser yazmış ama tek hatası bana göre konuyu çok dağıtıyor anlatmaya çalışırken ve kısmen beni sıktı okurken. Çok fazla detaylara inerek alakasız kitaplardan alıntılar ile konudan iyice uzaklaşarak kafa karıştıran ve okuma zevkini azaltan bir üslup tercih etmiş.. Gene de güzel referanslar ile bir çok şey öğreten okuduğuma memnun olduğum çalışma..
Vakıfbank Yayınlarına da değinmeden olmaz, çok kaliteli baskısı, sayfa kalitesi kapak tasarımı ve seçtikleri kitaplar ile çok başarılı işler yapıyor kutlamak takdir etmek lazım..
**
" Avustralyalı eleştirmen Robert Hughes, eşitsizlik ve sosyal adaletsizlik yüzünden deliren Ressam Van Gogh'un acı dolu tanıklığının ifadesini yansıtan bir tablosunu bir milyonerin misafir odasında asılı görmenin insanda tiksinti yarattığı söylerken genel bir rahatsızlığı dillendirmektedir. "
**
" Adam Philips in Houdini's box kitabında öne sürdüğü gbi, hepimiz kaçan sanatçılarız çünkü istediğimiz hayat istemediğimiz şeylerden kaçmaya bağlıdır. "
August 12, 2014
An effective (& very amusing) read which leaves one with a clear head & confidence enough to see through the posturings about "art"--whether by "artists" or commentators. It cuts through the language used in the "art" industry, & makes stunningly simple & true points about what it's all about & how one can think about it.
Ever thought you're not qualified to think/write/speak publicly about "art"? Fear not! This book burns away the obfuscation with a flame-thrower & you'll be all the better for it.
Never quaver before critics & their multi-syllabic monographs again! You'll be able to spot the emperor's new clothes for yourself, & dismiss any high-handed "art" language (which normally uses words such as "investigate", "interrogate", "explore", "manufacture" "contemplate" etc to talk about, say, some pile of bricks in the middle of an "art" gallery floor).
Thanks John Carey! You've done the world a favour & none of us can thank you enough.
Ever thought you're not qualified to think/write/speak publicly about "art"? Fear not! This book burns away the obfuscation with a flame-thrower & you'll be all the better for it.
Never quaver before critics & their multi-syllabic monographs again! You'll be able to spot the emperor's new clothes for yourself, & dismiss any high-handed "art" language (which normally uses words such as "investigate", "interrogate", "explore", "manufacture" "contemplate" etc to talk about, say, some pile of bricks in the middle of an "art" gallery floor).
Thanks John Carey! You've done the world a favour & none of us can thank you enough.
August 12, 2010
At times, especially in the first half of the book, Carey is ridiculously abrasive. This is a decent trait for polemical writing, however, as the emotional reaction it can trigger in a reader leads to critical thinking. In the end, Carey puts up a pretty fierce argument that literature is by far the highest art form, in large part because it is the only art that can reason. I was like, "Whoop!"
September 19, 2016
This book raised a lot of interesting views about art and aesthetics, but while the author was very keen on mocking other people's perspectives, he didn't take the same critical scrutiny to his own views. I'm glad I read it, but it still left me wanting a book whose definitions were not so broad they were meaningless, or claims that are painfully insulting to any art which isn't literature.
March 10, 2016
I remember years ago sitting on a London bus with group of friends when one of the party expressed the view that ‘art makes people better’. This seemed odd and begged many questions: what is art, what is ‘being better’ and what could be the causal relation between the two? The statement seemed at best naïve and at worst arrogant. But, at the time, I was unable to pin down what made me so uncomfortable about it. A little while later I remembered a scene from the film Schindler’s List. In it a group of German soldiers are looking for Jews. They break down the front door of a house and the troops rush upstairs and, in their search, turn over beds and empty the contents from wardrobes. Meanwhile, downstairs the officer in charge finds a piano in the corner and begins to play. “Was ist das?”, asks one of the soldiers on returning downstairs, “Das ist Bach”, replies the officer. That great German music could be played at the same time that other Germans roundup Jews for genocide, would seem to show that art does not make individuals ethically better. Carey has many other examples like this, including the discussion of Hitler as an aesthete as well as a genocidal mass murderer. So, if art does not make people ‘better’, what’s the point?
In some ways I like Carey’s argument. There is a lot of semi-mystical discussion about art that is annoying. But my problem is that his answer to ‘what good are the arts’, is: whatever an individual thinks it is. Modern art got into this debate long before Carey, with Dada and other movements. If subjectivism rules and judgements are matters of a range of opinions none of which are better than others then Carey, as a professor of literature, need not to bothered reading Shakespeare, Austin and Wordsworth and could have just read romances and Jeffery Archer novels instead. Clearly, he felt more ‘indistinctness’ (a favourite word of his) in the former than the latter. He argues that literature is different. Well, he would say that wouldn’t he, given his day job. It is true, as he says, that literature can do somethings that other arts cannot; but all arts have their unique aspects and all arts have ‘indistinctness’, try music in particular.
Another problem with Carey’s argument is that art is never really defined and this question hovers in the background throughout the book (perhaps he thinks it’s impossible to define something that is totally subjective). He rightly defends the pleasure that working class women describe in watching Crossroads (a much ridiculed British soap), but who says that soaps cannot be well written and well-acted, although Crossroads had neither of these attributes. The friend I mentioned early who stated that ‘art makes people better’ was a baby-boomer American and her definition of art, I’m sure, would have included sixties artists such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. What Carey seems to be focusing upon is ‘high art’, but the idea that this is the only art seems dated.
In this context it is useful to look at film, which Carey does not. The classical art house films of Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and Satyajit Rai are judged, at least partly by English speakers, as so due to them bring in another language, as art film. What about Hitchcock, a popular and critical success. Some of Westerns I used to tease my mother as ‘just cowboy films’ are some of the most revered examples of film making, but some westerns are now understandably forgotten.
Carey discusses Bourdieu (mostly) approvingly. Bourdieu’s ideas are in all of our heads now. Culture is used in all class societies as a way for dominant groups to delineate themselves from others. One Conservative minister, George Young, referred to the homeless in London as those people “you have to step over when you leave the opera”. Alexi Sayle once said that he had stopped being an artist as it was “just about making stuff to amuse posh people”; this seems to be Carey’s focus. But art is much wider than that. Art is created by many and the responses of people to art are complex and varied. People can find a resonance in a soap or a pop song, something that relates to their lives and is important to them and this is not to be dismissed. Also in terms of quality a Beatles or Adele song can be as strong as a Schubert lieder, but some pop is not good and some musicians are better than others. Some ‘classical music’ is better than other ‘classical music’. Some books use language more intensely and have more depth than others. There can be a qualitative difference, but not between ‘high and low’, but within all.
But to return to ‘high-culture’: if it is used in a class society as an emblem of superiority, what of those who are not part of the dominant class and how are they to respond to art? There are two main responses: to try to ape middle class culture and risk ridicule (Hyacinth Bucket) or to reject it. Tony Parsons once said (I paraphrase) that: “working class children don’t want to be middle class, they want to be working class, but with money”. When I was a teenager and my father found me listening to Bartok’s string quartets, he raged that I was listening to “piss-pot music”. The impact of this takes us outside of Carey’s book, but if much of education is, at least partly, opening access to culture that dominant classes use to define themselves, there is a strong likelihood that it will be rejected by working class young people. When Bookstart, a project to give books to all young children was introduced in the UK, one father rejected the offer, arguing that books would make his child “into a puff” (gay). The lowest achieving group educationally in the UK is the white working class; they reject a culture that they think rejects them. We should all be fighting against this.
Finally, there is something very English about Carey. He is suspicious about fancy sounding arguments about art amongst philosophers and examples of what he likes are confined to examples derived from English literature. Indeed, he argues that there is something special about the English language and its richness in metaphors and similes that gives it its strength. Something no other language has! No empirical evidence for the greatness of Englishness is provided, despite his enthusiasm for scientific evidence in other chapters.
I do like Carey though. He is a decent, intelligent man and an egalitarian. He doesn’t like snobbery and the use that elites make of high-art. But even in this ‘snobbery’ is a tricky term. One of my nieces expressed on Facebook her disappointment that the football programme she wanted to see was to be on later due to the Proms, which is “only for snobs anyway”. She had accepted that this was not a culture for her and for her, Carey too would be a snob.
But if art (and especially high-art) is somewhere between tricky and impossible to define and it is used as a class emblem and can therefore damage working class people, is it all just a matter of opinion. I don’t think so and I think that Carey is throwing out the baby with the bath water. I also don’t think that Carey really thinks that the view that Jane Austin is better than Barbara Cartland is just a matter of opinion. Some art, in all forms, visual, language and musically based, are richer, more complex, ambiguous and sometimes beautiful, than others and there is no Berlin wall between high art and popular art.
In some ways I like Carey’s argument. There is a lot of semi-mystical discussion about art that is annoying. But my problem is that his answer to ‘what good are the arts’, is: whatever an individual thinks it is. Modern art got into this debate long before Carey, with Dada and other movements. If subjectivism rules and judgements are matters of a range of opinions none of which are better than others then Carey, as a professor of literature, need not to bothered reading Shakespeare, Austin and Wordsworth and could have just read romances and Jeffery Archer novels instead. Clearly, he felt more ‘indistinctness’ (a favourite word of his) in the former than the latter. He argues that literature is different. Well, he would say that wouldn’t he, given his day job. It is true, as he says, that literature can do somethings that other arts cannot; but all arts have their unique aspects and all arts have ‘indistinctness’, try music in particular.
Another problem with Carey’s argument is that art is never really defined and this question hovers in the background throughout the book (perhaps he thinks it’s impossible to define something that is totally subjective). He rightly defends the pleasure that working class women describe in watching Crossroads (a much ridiculed British soap), but who says that soaps cannot be well written and well-acted, although Crossroads had neither of these attributes. The friend I mentioned early who stated that ‘art makes people better’ was a baby-boomer American and her definition of art, I’m sure, would have included sixties artists such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. What Carey seems to be focusing upon is ‘high art’, but the idea that this is the only art seems dated.
In this context it is useful to look at film, which Carey does not. The classical art house films of Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and Satyajit Rai are judged, at least partly by English speakers, as so due to them bring in another language, as art film. What about Hitchcock, a popular and critical success. Some of Westerns I used to tease my mother as ‘just cowboy films’ are some of the most revered examples of film making, but some westerns are now understandably forgotten.
Carey discusses Bourdieu (mostly) approvingly. Bourdieu’s ideas are in all of our heads now. Culture is used in all class societies as a way for dominant groups to delineate themselves from others. One Conservative minister, George Young, referred to the homeless in London as those people “you have to step over when you leave the opera”. Alexi Sayle once said that he had stopped being an artist as it was “just about making stuff to amuse posh people”; this seems to be Carey’s focus. But art is much wider than that. Art is created by many and the responses of people to art are complex and varied. People can find a resonance in a soap or a pop song, something that relates to their lives and is important to them and this is not to be dismissed. Also in terms of quality a Beatles or Adele song can be as strong as a Schubert lieder, but some pop is not good and some musicians are better than others. Some ‘classical music’ is better than other ‘classical music’. Some books use language more intensely and have more depth than others. There can be a qualitative difference, but not between ‘high and low’, but within all.
But to return to ‘high-culture’: if it is used in a class society as an emblem of superiority, what of those who are not part of the dominant class and how are they to respond to art? There are two main responses: to try to ape middle class culture and risk ridicule (Hyacinth Bucket) or to reject it. Tony Parsons once said (I paraphrase) that: “working class children don’t want to be middle class, they want to be working class, but with money”. When I was a teenager and my father found me listening to Bartok’s string quartets, he raged that I was listening to “piss-pot music”. The impact of this takes us outside of Carey’s book, but if much of education is, at least partly, opening access to culture that dominant classes use to define themselves, there is a strong likelihood that it will be rejected by working class young people. When Bookstart, a project to give books to all young children was introduced in the UK, one father rejected the offer, arguing that books would make his child “into a puff” (gay). The lowest achieving group educationally in the UK is the white working class; they reject a culture that they think rejects them. We should all be fighting against this.
Finally, there is something very English about Carey. He is suspicious about fancy sounding arguments about art amongst philosophers and examples of what he likes are confined to examples derived from English literature. Indeed, he argues that there is something special about the English language and its richness in metaphors and similes that gives it its strength. Something no other language has! No empirical evidence for the greatness of Englishness is provided, despite his enthusiasm for scientific evidence in other chapters.
I do like Carey though. He is a decent, intelligent man and an egalitarian. He doesn’t like snobbery and the use that elites make of high-art. But even in this ‘snobbery’ is a tricky term. One of my nieces expressed on Facebook her disappointment that the football programme she wanted to see was to be on later due to the Proms, which is “only for snobs anyway”. She had accepted that this was not a culture for her and for her, Carey too would be a snob.
But if art (and especially high-art) is somewhere between tricky and impossible to define and it is used as a class emblem and can therefore damage working class people, is it all just a matter of opinion. I don’t think so and I think that Carey is throwing out the baby with the bath water. I also don’t think that Carey really thinks that the view that Jane Austin is better than Barbara Cartland is just a matter of opinion. Some art, in all forms, visual, language and musically based, are richer, more complex, ambiguous and sometimes beautiful, than others and there is no Berlin wall between high art and popular art.
September 30, 2010
This is a thought provoking book. It's the kind of book that I would recommend to a book club if I was in one and then we would have one of the best discussions we've had. I would encourage anyone who works in the arts or consumes high quantities of both "high" culture and "low" culture to read this. If you think that looking at a Monet is a fundamentally more valuable experience than watching an episode of Jersey Shore, prepare to have a debate with this man. I gave it four stars instead of five because certain points are elaborated on more than was necessary. Now I have to go write a paper about whether or not this book should change our approach to arts policy.
December 22, 2022
Super interesting book about the importance of art and literature and how it benefits mankind. I really like John Carey’s writing style and have read a few of his books now.
Here are the best bits from the book:
The most excellent works of every art, the most noble productions of genius, Schopenhauer admonishes, must always remain sealed books to the dull majority of men, inaccessible to them, separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of princes is inaccessible to the common people.
The Catholic critic Jacques Maritain predicts that the Christian God will burn the Parthenon and Chartres cathedral and the Sistine Chapel and the Mass in C on the last day, so as to demonstrate that we should not seek eternal life in art. That is hardly the behaviour of an art-lover, and the biblical God's prohibition of all graven images and likenesses, recorded in Exodus 20:4, suggests a marked antipathy to the visual arts.
Whatever the particular circumstances, the argument of the high-art champions will be reducible to something like this: The experience I get when I look at a Rembrandt or listen to Mozart is more valuable than the experience you get when you look at or listen to whatever kitsch or sentimental outpourings you get pleasure from. The logical objection to this argument is that 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. A very little self-examination will tell us that the sources of our own pleasures and preferences are by no means apparent, even to us. In each of us there is an undiscovered country. Writers have known this, and have been telling us about it, for a long time. Here, for example, is Virginia Woolf. 'We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each, a snowfield even when the print of birds’ feet is unknown.
Art is "enchantment', and true artists have the right of spells'. This is not, it seems, mere whimsy on Winterson's part. Her belief that she is surrounded by magical presences strikes the ordinary observer as barely sane. 'I move gingerly', she confides, 'around the paintings I own because I know that they are looking at me as closely as 1 am looking at them.
Anthropological evidence suggests that romantic love is virtually universal across cultures. In evolutionary terms it binds hominid parents and so increases the chance of offspring survival. What is new is not its existence but its enormous prominence in popular art, which functions to counteract modern solitude.
It is not necessary to descend to the level of the people and fabricate some special, rougher goods for them. If we are to talk about popular literature at all, it doesn't mean there should be popular literature on the one hand and high' on the other. I should like high literature to become popular. As Adam Phillips has argued in his book Houdini's Box, we are all escape artists, since the lives we want depend on our avoiding what we do not want. In this sense escapism is fundamental to our sense of ourselves, and to condemn it reveals curious priorities.
as the psychologist William James conceded when he wrote, of alcohol, that to the poor and unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature.
He asserts, for example, that film is such a rapid Medium that it leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience'.
Another evil of print-culture, as McLuhan saw it, was that it forced the whole of experience into a linear, standardized form. Whereas tribal cultures, innocent of literacy, had nurtured non-linear thought - metaphorical, mythic, imaginative - the tyranny of print, and the modes of attention inseparable from it, had paved the way to specialization, regimentation, mass production, nationalism and modern militarism.
modern life lacks authenticity. Bombarded with images by the media, we are unsure of our own existence. Videos, home movies, and the simulacra of television have produced a visceral feeling of identity-lack, of being a mere phantom, an 'android or replicant, rather than a real person.
Perhaps. The hijackers' motives are undiscoverable. But if, as Hartman supposes, they were driven by a quest for authenticity, for the spiritual and sacred, akin to that which he associates with high art, then they could also illustrate the disregard or contempt for other and lower' people, for their lives and meanings that high art fosters.
Van Gogh's sunflowers or Monet's water-lilies. They may be the equivalent 'in colour-space'
of the stick with the three stripes, in that they excite the visual neurons that represent colour memories of those flowers even more effectively than a real sunflower or water-lily might.
Other biologists have associated symmetry with sexual selection in a wide variety of species. The female sCorpion fly prefers males with symmetrical wings; the female barn swallow prefers males with a symmetrical wishbone pattern of feathers on their tails. Such preferences may, it is thought, have evolutionary value, since symmetry may be a sign that the male's immune system is resistant to parasites that would cause uneven growth.
The belief that art can make people better goes back to classical times. Aristotle taught that music was character-forming and should be introduced into the education of the young. In listening to music, he maintained, 'our souls undergo a change.
It arouses 'moral qualities'. However, it must be the right sort of music. The wrong sort of music, particularly that of the flute, which Aristotle considered 'too exciting, appeals to 'mechanics, labourers, and the like', as well as to slaves and children, and its influence is 'vulgarizing.
Plato, of course, thought that the arts make people worse.
Similarly absurd, Tolstoy insists, is the claim that Western art is real and 'true and the source of the 'highest spiritual enjoyment'. Two thirds of the human race (all the people of Asia and Africa) live and die knowing nothing of this sole and supreme art. And even in our Christian society hardly one per cent of the people make use of this art.
Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day, and more than a billion live in what the UN classifies as absolute poverty. 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 2 billion no access to electricity; 3 billion no access to sanitation. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or write. Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are chronically undernourished, and each year more than the entire population of Sweden, between 13 and 18 million, mostly children, die of starvation or the side-effects of malnutrition. Meanwhile the Western nations live in unprecedented luxury. The richest 20 per cent of the population of the developed countries consumes 86 per cent of the world's goods. Shopping for inessentials on which to off-load surplus wealth is a major Western occupation, as are programmes for countering the effects of over-eating. Annual expenditure on alcoholic drinks in Europe is $1o5 billion, whereas global expenditure on providing basic health and nutrition for the world's poorest is $13 billion.
Art as psychological therapy seems doubtful, then, and art as an improver of personality and morals appears even less promising. Gardner's suggestion that artistic proficiency based on body-thinking engenders a capacity for interpersonal relations looks susceptible to objective testing. But where tests have been attempted they do not yield encouraging results. He cites a study, published in Genetic Psychology Monographs, which reports on a psychological assessment of actors and others working in the theatrical profession. It concludes that such people have difficulty establishing normal family ties, and undergo a higher-than-average proportion of divorces. Also, they tend to be insensitive to other people's feelings, treating them as objects to be amused, teased or manipulated.
A crucial difference between them, so Lewis-Williams and some other anthropologists believe, was that the Neanderthals, because of the neurological structure of their brains, could not form or remember mental images, whereas the new men could.
Berlin Philharmonic in the closing days of the war. There was, apparently, an understanding that when the programme included Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, the final phase of the Third Reich would have come. The concert of 13 April included it, and as the audience left after the performance uniformed members of Hitler Youth at the exits handed out free cyanide capsules.
But, Dissanayake regrets,'our marvellous, long-evolved, specialized hands, which can weave baskets, fashion arrows, or mould vessels, are now chiefly used for pressing buttons on appliances and computer keyboards. This means that we lose the sense of competence for life that making and handling things gives. She cites Neil Postman's book Technopoly: The Sterender of Culture to Technology, which estimates that between the age of three and eighteen the average young American watches half a million TV commercials.
Bacon had said that men without goodness were 'vermin'.
Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life.
Here are the best bits from the book:
The most excellent works of every art, the most noble productions of genius, Schopenhauer admonishes, must always remain sealed books to the dull majority of men, inaccessible to them, separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of princes is inaccessible to the common people.
The Catholic critic Jacques Maritain predicts that the Christian God will burn the Parthenon and Chartres cathedral and the Sistine Chapel and the Mass in C on the last day, so as to demonstrate that we should not seek eternal life in art. That is hardly the behaviour of an art-lover, and the biblical God's prohibition of all graven images and likenesses, recorded in Exodus 20:4, suggests a marked antipathy to the visual arts.
Whatever the particular circumstances, the argument of the high-art champions will be reducible to something like this: The experience I get when I look at a Rembrandt or listen to Mozart is more valuable than the experience you get when you look at or listen to whatever kitsch or sentimental outpourings you get pleasure from. The logical objection to this argument is that 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. A very little self-examination will tell us that the sources of our own pleasures and preferences are by no means apparent, even to us. In each of us there is an undiscovered country. Writers have known this, and have been telling us about it, for a long time. Here, for example, is Virginia Woolf. 'We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each, a snowfield even when the print of birds’ feet is unknown.
Art is "enchantment', and true artists have the right of spells'. This is not, it seems, mere whimsy on Winterson's part. Her belief that she is surrounded by magical presences strikes the ordinary observer as barely sane. 'I move gingerly', she confides, 'around the paintings I own because I know that they are looking at me as closely as 1 am looking at them.
Anthropological evidence suggests that romantic love is virtually universal across cultures. In evolutionary terms it binds hominid parents and so increases the chance of offspring survival. What is new is not its existence but its enormous prominence in popular art, which functions to counteract modern solitude.
It is not necessary to descend to the level of the people and fabricate some special, rougher goods for them. If we are to talk about popular literature at all, it doesn't mean there should be popular literature on the one hand and high' on the other. I should like high literature to become popular. As Adam Phillips has argued in his book Houdini's Box, we are all escape artists, since the lives we want depend on our avoiding what we do not want. In this sense escapism is fundamental to our sense of ourselves, and to condemn it reveals curious priorities.
as the psychologist William James conceded when he wrote, of alcohol, that to the poor and unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature.
He asserts, for example, that film is such a rapid Medium that it leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience'.
Another evil of print-culture, as McLuhan saw it, was that it forced the whole of experience into a linear, standardized form. Whereas tribal cultures, innocent of literacy, had nurtured non-linear thought - metaphorical, mythic, imaginative - the tyranny of print, and the modes of attention inseparable from it, had paved the way to specialization, regimentation, mass production, nationalism and modern militarism.
modern life lacks authenticity. Bombarded with images by the media, we are unsure of our own existence. Videos, home movies, and the simulacra of television have produced a visceral feeling of identity-lack, of being a mere phantom, an 'android or replicant, rather than a real person.
Perhaps. The hijackers' motives are undiscoverable. But if, as Hartman supposes, they were driven by a quest for authenticity, for the spiritual and sacred, akin to that which he associates with high art, then they could also illustrate the disregard or contempt for other and lower' people, for their lives and meanings that high art fosters.
Van Gogh's sunflowers or Monet's water-lilies. They may be the equivalent 'in colour-space'
of the stick with the three stripes, in that they excite the visual neurons that represent colour memories of those flowers even more effectively than a real sunflower or water-lily might.
Other biologists have associated symmetry with sexual selection in a wide variety of species. The female sCorpion fly prefers males with symmetrical wings; the female barn swallow prefers males with a symmetrical wishbone pattern of feathers on their tails. Such preferences may, it is thought, have evolutionary value, since symmetry may be a sign that the male's immune system is resistant to parasites that would cause uneven growth.
The belief that art can make people better goes back to classical times. Aristotle taught that music was character-forming and should be introduced into the education of the young. In listening to music, he maintained, 'our souls undergo a change.
It arouses 'moral qualities'. However, it must be the right sort of music. The wrong sort of music, particularly that of the flute, which Aristotle considered 'too exciting, appeals to 'mechanics, labourers, and the like', as well as to slaves and children, and its influence is 'vulgarizing.
Plato, of course, thought that the arts make people worse.
Similarly absurd, Tolstoy insists, is the claim that Western art is real and 'true and the source of the 'highest spiritual enjoyment'. Two thirds of the human race (all the people of Asia and Africa) live and die knowing nothing of this sole and supreme art. And even in our Christian society hardly one per cent of the people make use of this art.
Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day, and more than a billion live in what the UN classifies as absolute poverty. 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 2 billion no access to electricity; 3 billion no access to sanitation. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or write. Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are chronically undernourished, and each year more than the entire population of Sweden, between 13 and 18 million, mostly children, die of starvation or the side-effects of malnutrition. Meanwhile the Western nations live in unprecedented luxury. The richest 20 per cent of the population of the developed countries consumes 86 per cent of the world's goods. Shopping for inessentials on which to off-load surplus wealth is a major Western occupation, as are programmes for countering the effects of over-eating. Annual expenditure on alcoholic drinks in Europe is $1o5 billion, whereas global expenditure on providing basic health and nutrition for the world's poorest is $13 billion.
Art as psychological therapy seems doubtful, then, and art as an improver of personality and morals appears even less promising. Gardner's suggestion that artistic proficiency based on body-thinking engenders a capacity for interpersonal relations looks susceptible to objective testing. But where tests have been attempted they do not yield encouraging results. He cites a study, published in Genetic Psychology Monographs, which reports on a psychological assessment of actors and others working in the theatrical profession. It concludes that such people have difficulty establishing normal family ties, and undergo a higher-than-average proportion of divorces. Also, they tend to be insensitive to other people's feelings, treating them as objects to be amused, teased or manipulated.
A crucial difference between them, so Lewis-Williams and some other anthropologists believe, was that the Neanderthals, because of the neurological structure of their brains, could not form or remember mental images, whereas the new men could.
Berlin Philharmonic in the closing days of the war. There was, apparently, an understanding that when the programme included Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, the final phase of the Third Reich would have come. The concert of 13 April included it, and as the audience left after the performance uniformed members of Hitler Youth at the exits handed out free cyanide capsules.
But, Dissanayake regrets,'our marvellous, long-evolved, specialized hands, which can weave baskets, fashion arrows, or mould vessels, are now chiefly used for pressing buttons on appliances and computer keyboards. This means that we lose the sense of competence for life that making and handling things gives. She cites Neil Postman's book Technopoly: The Sterender of Culture to Technology, which estimates that between the age of three and eighteen the average young American watches half a million TV commercials.
Bacon had said that men without goodness were 'vermin'.
Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life.
July 21, 2023
⭐️⭐️
If I didn’t have to read this for my masters course I wouldn’t even glance at it
If I didn’t have to read this for my masters course I wouldn’t even glance at it
October 21, 2013
When I’ve first put my hand on John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts?, I couldn’t dare asking why and how his views resulted in much controversy among art scholars in UK and Europe in general. At a glimpse, his views seemed so British-systemized to me, but when I started learning more about British culture I realized it was more than just that. I personally got more interested in Carey’s book when I discussed its contents with my teachers and colleagues. It’s inevitable to admit that Carey was funny, stimulating and witty throughout the whole book. Yet, he contradicted himself in few occasions. In his book, he pointed out literature as a good art and exemplified good art in prisoner’s moral benefit from reading Shakespeare. Before that, he made us believe that ‘good’ art is not necessarily ‘high’ and he concluded that it could not make us better. Carey, here, demolishes distinctions between 'high' and 'low' art, which he argues have their origins in social snobbery rather than aesthetic purism. Irrelatively but almost a fact, his cultural views introduced him as a New Labour apparatchik –or at least that’s how it sounded like.
September 12, 2008
I badly wanted to like this book. I bought it because Nick Hornby raved about it in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. I thought it was going to knock down all the phoneyness and bullshit, which plagues the arts. I was sure I would love it. But, I got halfway through and gave up because that was enough to convince me that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His definition of a work of art is 'anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art'. In other words anything, and correspondingly, nothing. If he were just condemning elitism that would be great, but condemning everything is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I prefer the approach taken by Robert Pirsig, who says we all agree that some things have value, we just don't agree on what those things are. Not exactly an answer, but an interesting place to start.
January 14, 2020
This is the third book I've read from John Carey--I'm glad I waited for it, since his previous books built some trust in me that carried me through some potential difficulties. Carey does delight in dismantling. Imagine someone who delights in disassembling furniture rather than building it. And he uses phrases like "the precision of uncooked spaghetti," which make me chuckle.
One of Carey's most resonant points for me is that modernist art is elitist. The Intellectuals and the Masses fleshed this out exceedingly well, but Carey carries the argument to art rather than literature here. He mentions the decline of painting, poetry, origami, and other forms of art with the rise of popular forms of art, like music and drama. What Good Are the Arts? was published in 2006, and I'd be interested to see some new commentary in our social-media driven world. Personally, I follow a lot of visual artists (digital and physical media) and poets on social media, and many of them are able to make livings through their platforms. We're in a different age from fourteen years ago. It's literally possible to provide for yourself by making videos of yourself doing what you love. The ephemerality of these professions notwithstanding, we're in a different place with art than we were in 2006.
Carey rings a death knell for "high" vs. "low" art, with the rather Lewisian argument that one's feelings cannot be considered more valuable than another's. Thus, a wealthy person's admiration for Van Gogh is not worth more than an average person's admiration for Bill Watterson. And what is art? "If you think it is art, then it is." While strikingly reminiscent of C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, Carey does not reference Lewis here, despite his shared Oxonian credentials and overlap with Lewis. His pertinent example is Shakespeare's transition from low to high art over time. In his time, Shakespeare played for the masses and the royal court, but in the 17th century was considered lowbrow, but by the 19th century achieved his status as an undisputed great writer, renowned among speakers and readers of English. Who's to say whether Shakespeare is "high" or "low" art? For Carey, the only ones who need "high" and "low" art are the self-titled "intellectuals" who must feel superior to the "masses." In America, at least, I've heard some "lowbrow" people claim the title proudly, but in a sort of reverse-superiority complex way, saying that their preferences for "low" art make them superior to those who prefer "high" art.
Chapter 4, "Do the Arts Make Us Better?," makes the rather obvious argument that we can't prove that art makes us better people. Carey leans heavily on subjectivity--exposure to art doesn't mean an increase in morality as a rule. I think of all the class trips I've seen in art museums, where teachers still have to admonish their students, despite the presence of a nearby Greek sculpture. This chapter stirred up the most cognitive dissonance in me, because Carey and I operate from very different worldviews. He, an acknowledged secularist, simply has a different approach to morality, understanding oneself, and interacting with the world than I do. However, his point that exposure to art itself does not improve morality is one with which I agree. There is nothing intrinsic in exposure that makes one better. Art certainly can, and many times does, make one a better person. But it doesn't as a rule.
Carey's argument really shines in the final two chapters when he deals with literature, since he is a literary scholar. What Good Are the Arts? is a book, and Carey argues that literature is the only art that reasons. While music and visual art can respond and parody and provoke, those mediums cannot reason unless they borrow words from literature. Art criticism is usually disseminated as text, not visual art. He bears quoting at length:
"Literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning." (208)
Carey looks closely at the successes and failures of art used in prisons and therapies. Literature had a rather better success rate in the examples he cites than visual art. In prisons at least, part of this is due to the accessibility of literature vs. painting on the outside for those released from their sentences. Again, I think we're in a different world now. Art supplies are readily available, along with platforms for displaying and selling art. I can easily imagine an ex-con sharing his or her artwork online and going viral. Yet, Carey's point is well-taken. Though he is British and thus has a very different government and national history to contend with, I do agree that the arts should be better supported in public education and society at large. Yet, as an American, I've experienced art and culture in a different way. In high school and college, I realized that my first introduction to things like the opera Carmen and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis came from the PBS show Arthur. "High" art introduced through "low" art. Who's to say what's what? Likes, dislikes, and taste are personal--subjective--and I'd rather see communities spring up around shared appreciations than rigid structures about what's "high" art and what's not.
"Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life." (260)
One of Carey's most resonant points for me is that modernist art is elitist. The Intellectuals and the Masses fleshed this out exceedingly well, but Carey carries the argument to art rather than literature here. He mentions the decline of painting, poetry, origami, and other forms of art with the rise of popular forms of art, like music and drama. What Good Are the Arts? was published in 2006, and I'd be interested to see some new commentary in our social-media driven world. Personally, I follow a lot of visual artists (digital and physical media) and poets on social media, and many of them are able to make livings through their platforms. We're in a different age from fourteen years ago. It's literally possible to provide for yourself by making videos of yourself doing what you love. The ephemerality of these professions notwithstanding, we're in a different place with art than we were in 2006.
Carey rings a death knell for "high" vs. "low" art, with the rather Lewisian argument that one's feelings cannot be considered more valuable than another's. Thus, a wealthy person's admiration for Van Gogh is not worth more than an average person's admiration for Bill Watterson. And what is art? "If you think it is art, then it is." While strikingly reminiscent of C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, Carey does not reference Lewis here, despite his shared Oxonian credentials and overlap with Lewis. His pertinent example is Shakespeare's transition from low to high art over time. In his time, Shakespeare played for the masses and the royal court, but in the 17th century was considered lowbrow, but by the 19th century achieved his status as an undisputed great writer, renowned among speakers and readers of English. Who's to say whether Shakespeare is "high" or "low" art? For Carey, the only ones who need "high" and "low" art are the self-titled "intellectuals" who must feel superior to the "masses." In America, at least, I've heard some "lowbrow" people claim the title proudly, but in a sort of reverse-superiority complex way, saying that their preferences for "low" art make them superior to those who prefer "high" art.
Chapter 4, "Do the Arts Make Us Better?," makes the rather obvious argument that we can't prove that art makes us better people. Carey leans heavily on subjectivity--exposure to art doesn't mean an increase in morality as a rule. I think of all the class trips I've seen in art museums, where teachers still have to admonish their students, despite the presence of a nearby Greek sculpture. This chapter stirred up the most cognitive dissonance in me, because Carey and I operate from very different worldviews. He, an acknowledged secularist, simply has a different approach to morality, understanding oneself, and interacting with the world than I do. However, his point that exposure to art itself does not improve morality is one with which I agree. There is nothing intrinsic in exposure that makes one better. Art certainly can, and many times does, make one a better person. But it doesn't as a rule.
Carey's argument really shines in the final two chapters when he deals with literature, since he is a literary scholar. What Good Are the Arts? is a book, and Carey argues that literature is the only art that reasons. While music and visual art can respond and parody and provoke, those mediums cannot reason unless they borrow words from literature. Art criticism is usually disseminated as text, not visual art. He bears quoting at length:
"Literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning." (208)
Carey looks closely at the successes and failures of art used in prisons and therapies. Literature had a rather better success rate in the examples he cites than visual art. In prisons at least, part of this is due to the accessibility of literature vs. painting on the outside for those released from their sentences. Again, I think we're in a different world now. Art supplies are readily available, along with platforms for displaying and selling art. I can easily imagine an ex-con sharing his or her artwork online and going viral. Yet, Carey's point is well-taken. Though he is British and thus has a very different government and national history to contend with, I do agree that the arts should be better supported in public education and society at large. Yet, as an American, I've experienced art and culture in a different way. In high school and college, I realized that my first introduction to things like the opera Carmen and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis came from the PBS show Arthur. "High" art introduced through "low" art. Who's to say what's what? Likes, dislikes, and taste are personal--subjective--and I'd rather see communities spring up around shared appreciations than rigid structures about what's "high" art and what's not.
"Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life." (260)
March 31, 2014
I'm not sure what to say about this. I mostly agree with the author on his first thesis, that art is art because someone thinks it's art and there are no value judgments to be made because of that fact. But his second thesis, I don't know. He certainly lays out a case that literature, after all that, is in fact the superior art. He's not saying WHICH literature is superior, simply that reading/writing holds different, better meaning than art or music. I suppose that might be the case. But I'm not convinced.
This is dense reading, though the book is short, so be warned, if you do decide to pick it up.
This is dense reading, though the book is short, so be warned, if you do decide to pick it up.
February 3, 2010
After loving the first part of this book, in which Carey carefully examines the evidence behind the arts in general, I found myself totally hating the second party, in which Carey critical inquiry disintegrates into a rather boring interpretation of British literature. In his blind love and respect for classical literature, he falls prey to the exact vices that he critiques with such wit in other authors. He blindly presents his own opinions and elitist value judgements about literature as fact. What a disappointment.
March 15, 2009
Best quote from the book (in my lit. major opinion):
"..My claim is different. It is that literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also , because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning."
"..My claim is different. It is that literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also , because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning."
July 18, 2015
I'm abandoning this one because I feel like I've gotten his point and don't need it reiterated for the last half of the book. The first chapter is delightful and essential, arguing that traditional categorizations of high and low art or simply art and not-art are meaningless. Art is in the eye of the beholder and discussions of the relative value of various art is hooey. Apparently he spends the last part of the book talking about the importance of literature. But I'm done now.
January 1, 2026
Lo recomiendo para estudiantes de Historia del Arte o filantropos amateur. Desde luego no es una obra de referencia (como los ensayos de Fubini, Valeriano Bozal, Tatarkiewicz o Calinescu), ni una obra maestra de la estética como la de Terry Eagleton.
Pero es de utilidad para el lector que desee iniciarse en la crítica estética y poner en juego el debate y la dialéctica. Dicho esto, me gustaron algunos capítulos y otros no, pero se aprende con John Carey y sus perspectivas.
Pero es de utilidad para el lector que desee iniciarse en la crítica estética y poner en juego el debate y la dialéctica. Dicho esto, me gustaron algunos capítulos y otros no, pero se aprende con John Carey y sus perspectivas.
October 1, 2010
Dispels the self-righteous delusions about the power of Art an excellent book just for the critical thinking involved even if you don't have to agree with the author.
Read
July 22, 2013Because I'm a classical pianist, there are certain elements of Carey's argument that I disagree with by default. But he does a very good job of defending it. I'll give him that.
December 22, 2021
I have read The Unexpected Professor by John Carey and found him to be an excellent writer and insightful philosopher. After enjoying this first book by Carey, I searched for more of his work and found this title.
This book strikes me as an essay or even the result of a talk given by Carey. Carey’s thoughts are perceptive, and he backs up his thoughts with quotations from many other philosophers. He then presents his views either in agreement or opposition to their beliefs. If he were building a court case, this would be an effective approach, but in this essay, it was a little tedious. This reader accepted his viewpoint regarding the Arts yet found the combat with other philosophies beyond just making his point.
He starts by trying to define Art and concludes that it is very subjective and the appreciation of what is defined as Art is a personal decision. He brings the reader to the conclusion that Art is all around us and not just in a museum. His point is that the knowledge and appreciation of the Arts does not make a person more sophisticated, a better person or even a more moral person. He debunks all pretension that the Arts are reserved for the intellectually superior. The clarity of these points is easy to follow and appreciate, yet at times he goes deeper with his opinion about the irrational thoughts of writers and philosophers about the Arts.
Section two of his essay on the Arts states that literature is the highest standard in the field of the Arts. His point is that reading literature is transformative and opens the mind to broad concepts about life. Literature plants ideas in the mind that expand one’s critical thinking and therefore does make for a better person who thinks and evaluates the issues of life in a more rational way. He contrasts the works of other writers and their beliefs and values to illustrate his point on the value of literature. This reader found his comments easier to follow and appreciate and less abstract than his commentary on the Art of paintings and sculpture. His comments made this reader ponder how Dickens or Jane Austin or any other writer provides his characters with personalities that reflect their own opinions and taste, and I am sure this will have a positive influence on my readings in the future.
In this very interesting section, Carey introduced Samuel Johnsons. Arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history and it has been claimed that he is the one truly great critic of English literature. Carey's telling us about "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia" was captivating. At the age of fifty, Johnson wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral. Rasselas, the fourth son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley called The Happy Valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne". Rasselas grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place and, after much brooding, escapes by digging under the wall of the valley. He is to see the world and search for happiness. After a sojourn in Egypt, where he encounters various classes of society and undergoes a few adventures, he perceived the futility of his search and returns to Abyssinia because none of his hopes for happiness are achieved, profound! Carey tells us that the ageing Johnson was reflecting on his lost youth in the character of Rasselas. In Johnson’s Rasselas, we feel Johnson’s melancholy and agree that happiness is a relative term and absolute happiness is not achievable. Rasselas has also been viewed as a reflection of Johnson's melancholia projected on to the wider world, particularly at the time of his mother's death. Some have interpreted the work as an expression of Johnson's Christian beliefs, arguing that the work expresses the impossibility of finding happiness in life on earth, and asks the reader to look to God for ultimate satisfaction. The Johnson essay makes Carey’s point of Literature having an impact on our brains by making us think about abstract thoughts like - happiness. It is of interest to me that Carey quotes people like the moralist Johnson who developed his own moral code by reading the literature that came before him. It says to me that western philosophy while drawing on the past even back as far as the Greeks continues to build a moral code and state of mind based on contributions to human thought by the likes of current day literature.
This book was thought provoking and caused me to look at Art in a different way; John Carey achieved his objective! So now if I could only attend one of his classes in literature or philosophy at Oxford, I would be quite happy.
This book strikes me as an essay or even the result of a talk given by Carey. Carey’s thoughts are perceptive, and he backs up his thoughts with quotations from many other philosophers. He then presents his views either in agreement or opposition to their beliefs. If he were building a court case, this would be an effective approach, but in this essay, it was a little tedious. This reader accepted his viewpoint regarding the Arts yet found the combat with other philosophies beyond just making his point.
He starts by trying to define Art and concludes that it is very subjective and the appreciation of what is defined as Art is a personal decision. He brings the reader to the conclusion that Art is all around us and not just in a museum. His point is that the knowledge and appreciation of the Arts does not make a person more sophisticated, a better person or even a more moral person. He debunks all pretension that the Arts are reserved for the intellectually superior. The clarity of these points is easy to follow and appreciate, yet at times he goes deeper with his opinion about the irrational thoughts of writers and philosophers about the Arts.
Section two of his essay on the Arts states that literature is the highest standard in the field of the Arts. His point is that reading literature is transformative and opens the mind to broad concepts about life. Literature plants ideas in the mind that expand one’s critical thinking and therefore does make for a better person who thinks and evaluates the issues of life in a more rational way. He contrasts the works of other writers and their beliefs and values to illustrate his point on the value of literature. This reader found his comments easier to follow and appreciate and less abstract than his commentary on the Art of paintings and sculpture. His comments made this reader ponder how Dickens or Jane Austin or any other writer provides his characters with personalities that reflect their own opinions and taste, and I am sure this will have a positive influence on my readings in the future.
In this very interesting section, Carey introduced Samuel Johnsons. Arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history and it has been claimed that he is the one truly great critic of English literature. Carey's telling us about "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia" was captivating. At the age of fifty, Johnson wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral. Rasselas, the fourth son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley called The Happy Valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne". Rasselas grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place and, after much brooding, escapes by digging under the wall of the valley. He is to see the world and search for happiness. After a sojourn in Egypt, where he encounters various classes of society and undergoes a few adventures, he perceived the futility of his search and returns to Abyssinia because none of his hopes for happiness are achieved, profound! Carey tells us that the ageing Johnson was reflecting on his lost youth in the character of Rasselas. In Johnson’s Rasselas, we feel Johnson’s melancholy and agree that happiness is a relative term and absolute happiness is not achievable. Rasselas has also been viewed as a reflection of Johnson's melancholia projected on to the wider world, particularly at the time of his mother's death. Some have interpreted the work as an expression of Johnson's Christian beliefs, arguing that the work expresses the impossibility of finding happiness in life on earth, and asks the reader to look to God for ultimate satisfaction. The Johnson essay makes Carey’s point of Literature having an impact on our brains by making us think about abstract thoughts like - happiness. It is of interest to me that Carey quotes people like the moralist Johnson who developed his own moral code by reading the literature that came before him. It says to me that western philosophy while drawing on the past even back as far as the Greeks continues to build a moral code and state of mind based on contributions to human thought by the likes of current day literature.
This book was thought provoking and caused me to look at Art in a different way; John Carey achieved his objective! So now if I could only attend one of his classes in literature or philosophy at Oxford, I would be quite happy.
November 15, 2022
`The artistic practices of the human race throughout most of its history were communal and practical. The characteristics of popular or mass art that seem most objectionable to its high-art critics – violence, sensationalism, escapism, an obsession with romantic love, minister to human needs inherited from our remote ancestors over hundreds of thousands of years. Interests such as fashion, gardening and football can be shown to meet these needs in ways that high art does not.`
`Language is a relatively recent human acquisition and belongs to a much younger part of the brain. This may explain why linguistic description is a laborious matter. Whereas visually, we can take in an enormous amount of information in a fraction of a second`. – Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain by Semir Zeki.
To my mind, the issue of language is a major hindrance when attempting to discuss art or to determine what is and what is not a work of art. And as the author says, in the end it comes down to whether you as an individual consider something a work of art or not which is important, and many of us may not be able to make such a judgement. Consensus is a word Carey uses in the appendix. Where is the consensus as to what is a work of art? You might personally like a piece of work but does that mean it is a work of art? Perhaps it is the wrong question. A question which is impossible to answer. A substitution of the word Art with Creative seems to sit better and may be less demanding and less loaded with expectation or prejudice.
`We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each, a snowfield where even the print of birds` feet is unknown.` - Virginia Woolf
In the latter half of the book, Carey talks about literature and makes his case that it is through this medium that we may feed our imaginations to the highest degree. My own feeling is that, again, the language is getting in the way here. What is art? Should literature be called art? The attempts at categorisation or labelling is part of the problem. Carey talks of the indistinctness of creative literature and how the reader has to impart his or her own personal interpretation to a piece.
`How we read, and how we give meanings to the indistinctness of what we read, is affected by what we have read in the past. Our past reading becomes part of our imagination, and that is what we read with. Since every reader`s record of reading is different, this means that every reader brings a new imagination to each book or poem. It also means that every reader makes new connections between texts and puts together, in the course of time, personal networks of association.`
This idea appeals to me. The idea that everyone has a different psychological response to a given piece of literature is fascinating and reinforces the notion that we are all unique human beings.
One thing I like about John Carey, is that he mentions numerous other books in his work. This provides a welcome fount of new material to read.
`Language is a relatively recent human acquisition and belongs to a much younger part of the brain. This may explain why linguistic description is a laborious matter. Whereas visually, we can take in an enormous amount of information in a fraction of a second`. – Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain by Semir Zeki.
To my mind, the issue of language is a major hindrance when attempting to discuss art or to determine what is and what is not a work of art. And as the author says, in the end it comes down to whether you as an individual consider something a work of art or not which is important, and many of us may not be able to make such a judgement. Consensus is a word Carey uses in the appendix. Where is the consensus as to what is a work of art? You might personally like a piece of work but does that mean it is a work of art? Perhaps it is the wrong question. A question which is impossible to answer. A substitution of the word Art with Creative seems to sit better and may be less demanding and less loaded with expectation or prejudice.
`We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each, a snowfield where even the print of birds` feet is unknown.` - Virginia Woolf
In the latter half of the book, Carey talks about literature and makes his case that it is through this medium that we may feed our imaginations to the highest degree. My own feeling is that, again, the language is getting in the way here. What is art? Should literature be called art? The attempts at categorisation or labelling is part of the problem. Carey talks of the indistinctness of creative literature and how the reader has to impart his or her own personal interpretation to a piece.
`How we read, and how we give meanings to the indistinctness of what we read, is affected by what we have read in the past. Our past reading becomes part of our imagination, and that is what we read with. Since every reader`s record of reading is different, this means that every reader brings a new imagination to each book or poem. It also means that every reader makes new connections between texts and puts together, in the course of time, personal networks of association.`
This idea appeals to me. The idea that everyone has a different psychological response to a given piece of literature is fascinating and reinforces the notion that we are all unique human beings.
One thing I like about John Carey, is that he mentions numerous other books in his work. This provides a welcome fount of new material to read.
February 5, 2021
This spicy and provocative book is two-thirds lecture series with the final third a disquisition on the value of literature. The lectures are by far and away the better part of the book although the concluding two essays on literature are well worth reading. Carey asks four questions and gives (in my view) common-sense answers in an entertaining and pointed way. To that old chestnut, "What is a work of art?" Carey responds anything that anyone has ever declared to be a work of art. Which is admirably democratic and will cut short many a wine-fuelled late night undergraduate discussion. "Is 'high' art superior?" - No, because it is too subjective a subject to form such a judgement upon. "Can science help?" - Not really, for the reason just given. "Do the arts make us better?" - self-evidently not. "Can art be a religion?" - no, and it's dangerous when it seems to become one. In arguing his points Carey makes good use of a range of stimulating sources and anecdotes that challenges you even if you agree with the conclusions that he reaches.
The final two chapters are a bit more patchy. His argument that literature is the greatest of the arts relies on the ambiguity that language contains within itself forcing our imagination to work harder as a result. Again, I agree with him - just - although it would have been interesting had he explored mixed media such as films. I thought that some of his readings of his chosen texts were a bit too clever-clever and created ambiguity where there was none. For instance, his reading of Clarence's dream in Richard III where a shadow is described as like an angel does not seem to me to be transgressing metaphorical boundaries as shadow in this instant is simply another word for shade/ghost and therefore does not have to be grey and featureless (see Banquo's gory locks in MacBeth). A ghost looking angelic doesn't pose problems of interpretation for me. However Carey has got in before me because, he points out, that anyone who disagrees with him proves him point - literature is ambiguous and therefore encounters many different readings.
The final two chapters are a bit more patchy. His argument that literature is the greatest of the arts relies on the ambiguity that language contains within itself forcing our imagination to work harder as a result. Again, I agree with him - just - although it would have been interesting had he explored mixed media such as films. I thought that some of his readings of his chosen texts were a bit too clever-clever and created ambiguity where there was none. For instance, his reading of Clarence's dream in Richard III where a shadow is described as like an angel does not seem to me to be transgressing metaphorical boundaries as shadow in this instant is simply another word for shade/ghost and therefore does not have to be grey and featureless (see Banquo's gory locks in MacBeth). A ghost looking angelic doesn't pose problems of interpretation for me. However Carey has got in before me because, he points out, that anyone who disagrees with him proves him point - literature is ambiguous and therefore encounters many different readings.
January 8, 2025
Was macht gute Kunst aus? Woran erkennt man sie oder liegt der Wert der Kunst vielleicht doch nur im Auge des Betrachters? John Carey bespricht in seinem Buch nicht nur den Wert, den man in Geld oder Bekanntheit messen kann. Er fragt auch, ob Kunst auch gut für uns ist und wenn ja, wieso.
Das Buch hat nach seiner Veröffentlichung für einiges Aufsehen erregt. John Carey schreibt fast schon respektlos. Er geht davon aus, dass Kunst oft nur durch Zufall entsteht, durch Vorlieben von Menschen und nicht immer durch echtes Können. Oft, so sagt er, sieht gerade die moderne Kunst nach etwas aus, was auch ein Kind hätte malen können. Warum ist ein Kinderbild dann keine Kunst, sondern das eines Erwachsenen? Wieso sieht man eine leere Galerie als Kunstwerk an, nicht aber ein aufgeräumtes Zimmer?
John Carey hat interessante Ansätze, mit denen er alte und neue Kunst betrachtet. Dabei spricht er nicht die Schönheit der Werke ab oder zumindest nicht allen. Über Boxen mit Exkrementen haben sowohl der Autor als auch ich uns gewundert. Aber er sagt auch, dass die Schönheit eines Bildes nicht rechtfertigt, dass dafür mehr Geld ausgegeben wird, als manches Land pro Jahr zur Verfügung hat.
Hinterfragt wird auch der Umgang mit Kunst. Ist es Zeitverschwendung, sich stundenlang mit aktueller Musik berieseln zu lassen aber nicht, viele Stunden in einer Oper zu verbringen? Ist ein Comic weniger wert als ein Gemälde, nur weil man weniger dafür bezahlt? Oder ist es nicht einfach die Frage der Zeit und der Menschen, die diese Dinge betrachten?
Ich konnte seine Argumente nachvollziehen, aber trotzdem hatte ich meine Schwierigkeiten mit dem Buch. Das mag daran liegen, dass ich die wenigsten der Kunstwerke, die besprochen wurden, kenne. Der zweite, kürzere Teil hat sich mit Literatur beschäftigt. Da hat er einige Sätze geschrieben, die mich sehr berührt haben. Das hat mich daran erinnert, warum ich sein Buch "Pure Pleasure" so mochte.
Das Buch hat nach seiner Veröffentlichung für einiges Aufsehen erregt. John Carey schreibt fast schon respektlos. Er geht davon aus, dass Kunst oft nur durch Zufall entsteht, durch Vorlieben von Menschen und nicht immer durch echtes Können. Oft, so sagt er, sieht gerade die moderne Kunst nach etwas aus, was auch ein Kind hätte malen können. Warum ist ein Kinderbild dann keine Kunst, sondern das eines Erwachsenen? Wieso sieht man eine leere Galerie als Kunstwerk an, nicht aber ein aufgeräumtes Zimmer?
John Carey hat interessante Ansätze, mit denen er alte und neue Kunst betrachtet. Dabei spricht er nicht die Schönheit der Werke ab oder zumindest nicht allen. Über Boxen mit Exkrementen haben sowohl der Autor als auch ich uns gewundert. Aber er sagt auch, dass die Schönheit eines Bildes nicht rechtfertigt, dass dafür mehr Geld ausgegeben wird, als manches Land pro Jahr zur Verfügung hat.
Hinterfragt wird auch der Umgang mit Kunst. Ist es Zeitverschwendung, sich stundenlang mit aktueller Musik berieseln zu lassen aber nicht, viele Stunden in einer Oper zu verbringen? Ist ein Comic weniger wert als ein Gemälde, nur weil man weniger dafür bezahlt? Oder ist es nicht einfach die Frage der Zeit und der Menschen, die diese Dinge betrachten?
Ich konnte seine Argumente nachvollziehen, aber trotzdem hatte ich meine Schwierigkeiten mit dem Buch. Das mag daran liegen, dass ich die wenigsten der Kunstwerke, die besprochen wurden, kenne. Der zweite, kürzere Teil hat sich mit Literatur beschäftigt. Da hat er einige Sätze geschrieben, die mich sehr berührt haben. Das hat mich daran erinnert, warum ich sein Buch "Pure Pleasure" so mochte.
October 2, 2018
The title is inappropriate. It should read "What Good Is Being a Snob?"
Carey spends most each chapter attempting to answer the question in that chapter's title. For example, Chapter 1 "What Is Art?" is answered with (I'm paraphrasing) "anything that has meaning to an individual".
Sure, I can get behind that.
But the rest of his so-called attack on the arts is really more of an attack on high art, and even then, less an attack on the art itself and more of an attack on how people use it to exalt themselves and create an air of superiority.
Again, I can get behind that. Art shouldn't be classist.
The book's real fault lies in the final two chapters, in which Carey tries to defend literature from his own assault in the first five chapters. It comes off as rather hypocritical (for lack of a better term) to build a fortress of snobbery in literature after having attacked visual arts, music, drama, etc.
Well, Carey. You tried.
Carey spends most each chapter attempting to answer the question in that chapter's title. For example, Chapter 1 "What Is Art?" is answered with (I'm paraphrasing) "anything that has meaning to an individual".
Sure, I can get behind that.
But the rest of his so-called attack on the arts is really more of an attack on high art, and even then, less an attack on the art itself and more of an attack on how people use it to exalt themselves and create an air of superiority.
Again, I can get behind that. Art shouldn't be classist.
The book's real fault lies in the final two chapters, in which Carey tries to defend literature from his own assault in the first five chapters. It comes off as rather hypocritical (for lack of a better term) to build a fortress of snobbery in literature after having attacked visual arts, music, drama, etc.
Well, Carey. You tried.
September 25, 2024
Mixed feelings. Did love the first part, in which the author wittily deconstructs the myth of high art. I often laughed out loud (which may be a result of me as a German having this romantic idea of British people and their oh-so-fabulous sense of humor)!
But the second half I found quite hard to get through. Here the author makes an argument for the superiority of literature. You know, i would have been willing to be convinced since I too love literature more than all the other arts! But without a degree in literature and intimate knowledge of the English literature canon of the last few centuries I mostly felt stupid reading this since I was seemingly ill-equipped to understand the examples etc.
Plus in the afterword, the author shits on his critics in a manner that could probably be called plain bullying, which i found irritating.
But the second half I found quite hard to get through. Here the author makes an argument for the superiority of literature. You know, i would have been willing to be convinced since I too love literature more than all the other arts! But without a degree in literature and intimate knowledge of the English literature canon of the last few centuries I mostly felt stupid reading this since I was seemingly ill-equipped to understand the examples etc.
Plus in the afterword, the author shits on his critics in a manner that could probably be called plain bullying, which i found irritating.
December 16, 2024
At its best, its educational and insightful. At its worst, however, its incoherent rubbish. The times at which Carey tries to do philosophy is embarrassing. His education on art history and art philosophy, as a scholar, is noteworthy, and the first couple of chapters are a good read for this alone. But his own philosophical takes are not great. There are times when he makes a compelling enough point. For example, the second last chapter is dedicated to the superiority of literature to the other arts. While he is generally convincing in this chapter, he talks in circles about the deep meaning behind children's books, for some reason, like Rasselas; and he draws, in my mind, incoherent connections between these children's books and other novels like Paradise Lost and the works of Jane Austen. Confusing. Perhaps worth a read if only because it is odd.
November 10, 2018
Un libro revelador que cuestiona muchos de las cualidades morales que, consciente o inconscientemente, se suelen atribuir al arte.
Carey relega los supuestos "beneficios", individuales y sociales, de la creación artística a una suerte de terapia ocupacional. Según argumenta, son los únicos que pueden probarse mediante estudios sistemáticos. Por lo demás, el aura que rodea al arte en la sociedad contemporánea es la misma que podría atribuirse a una religión (que tras el Romanticismo vino a suplantar)
Carey relega los supuestos "beneficios", individuales y sociales, de la creación artística a una suerte de terapia ocupacional. Según argumenta, son los únicos que pueden probarse mediante estudios sistemáticos. Por lo demás, el aura que rodea al arte en la sociedad contemporánea es la misma que podría atribuirse a una religión (que tras el Romanticismo vino a suplantar)
May 11, 2021
This was a fun read. It essentially skewers the pretensions and self importance of the art world. Recommended
Want to read
October 8, 2024Nick Hornby
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