The Use and Abuse of Art

by Jacques Barzun

From the celebrated cultural historian and bestselling author, a provocative history of the evolution of our ideas about art since the early nineteenth century

In this witty, provocative, and learned book, acclaimed cultural historian and writer Jacques Barzun traces our changing attitudes to the arts over the past 150 years, suggesting that we are living in a period of cultural liquidation, nothing less than the ending of the modern age that began with the Renaissance. He challenges our conceptions and misconceptions about art “in order to reach a conclusion about its value and its drawbacks for life at the present time.”

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Art History, Essays, Criticism

150 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1975

About the author

Works of French-American educator, author, and historian Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (see Charles Robert Darwin, Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner) (1941) and The American University (1968).

He presented ideas and culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques...

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found my notes to this book in a box in the loft (part of what will become known as “The Bryant Papers” in a few decades, I’m sure). These notes are nothing more or less than a Complete Theory of Art, and Art here means Everything , from Rheims cathedral to South Park. So, here it is. I’m sure most of this is Barzun’s ideas, but I’m pretty sure I added and tweaked a bit too, and it’s my list of examples at the end. So :

THE VERY SHORT BUT COMPLETE THEORY OF ART

Art performs one or more of three functions:

1) decorative (aesthetic). JB calls this “art as the enhancer of life”.

2) Self-expressive (which may be called therapeutic). JB calls this “art as a sanctuary… art as better than life… a truer reality”.

3) Ideological (aka inspirational) which subdivides into a) philosophical/religious, and b) political. JB calls this “art as the detergent of life… art for a better life”.

Furthermore, all art in these categories can be presented in two distinct modes:

i) the lyric – the celebratory, the incantation, the expression of depth, the interior

ii) the narrative – an incarnation within a sequence of events, the expression of breadth, the exterior

In order to make all this abstraction clearer, here are examples of each function and each mode. Not all are a perfect fit.

THE NOVEL

Decorative/lyric : The Waves by Virginia Woolf (not all novels employ plot & narrative and this one is more like poetry)
Decorative/narrative : any comedy or detective story, so let’s say The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, or Right Oh, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. These novels are wonderful decorations.

Self-expressive/lyric : Proust! I don’t think people read him for the galloping page-turning heart-thumping twists and turns of the plot.
Self-expressive/narrative : any autobiographical novel – say Sons & Lovers by D H Lawrence or The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien – I love that one.


Ideological/lyric : I guess this would be any major statement by an author in the form of a novel, so Utopia by Thomas Moore or the Fountainhead by Ayn rand would do – again, you don’t read these for the story
Ideological/narrative : there are hundreds – Germinal by Zola, The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, anything by Upton Sinclair

PAINTING

Decorative/lyric : all Bracque’s cubist stuff, all Fauvism, Matisse
Decorative/narrative : Renoir’s lovely illustrations of Parisian life – les Parapluies will do nicely, or Her First Outing.

Self-expressive/lyric : all your abstract impressionists fit here, Pollock, Rothko
Self-expressive/narrative : The Beatitudes of Love by Stanley Spencer, all about his own odd life, and very moving

Ideological/lyric : all propaganda posters, Soviet social realism
Ideological/narrative : Guernica by Picasso

POPULAR SONG

Decorative/lyric : arguably the majority of pop songs exist just to decorate our lives and nothing more. Hello Goodbye by The Beatles is an example of a particularly meaningless song which I happen to like a lot but couldn’t really tell you why.
Decorative/narrative : comedy songs will do here – let’s say Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West by Bennie Hill or With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock by George Formby (I hope you know that one!)

Self-expressive/lyric : here come all the mournful singer songwriters – Mother by John Lennon, Sara by Bob Dylan. The great mass of blues songs fit in here too.
Self-expressive/narrative : The last Time I saw Richard by Joni Mitchell or Ballad of John and Yoko by the moptops

Ideological/lyric : Four Women by Nina Simone; Crime in the City by Neil Young; What’s the matter Here by 10,000 Maniacs
Ideological/narrative : Deportee by Woody Guthrie (The Byrds do a great version); The lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll by Dylan; Hurricane by Dylan; Only a Pawn in their Game by Dylan!

POETRY


Decorative/lyric : You’re by Sylvia Plath
Decorative/narrative The Eve of St Agnes by jovial John Keats; The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

Self-expressive/lyric : Poem on my Birthday by Dylan Thomas
Self-expressive/narrative : In memoriam by Tennyson

Ideological/lyric : all your great World War One poets
Ideological/narrative : Essay on Man by Pope

MOVIES

Decorative/lyric : musicals often have little or no narrative content, just the thinnest excuse for a story to drape the songs and routines over, so any Fred Astaire film fits here, or more recently Moulin Rouge (was there any story in that one at all?)
Decorative/narrative : superhero movies, caper movies like Oceans 12, Bourne Identity, all that stuff

Self-expressive/lyric : Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, Pan’s Labyrinth; The Long Day Closes; Me and You and Everyone we Know
Self-expressive/narrative : Diner, Slacker; Hollywood Shuffle; In America

Ideological/lyric : Human Nature
Ideological/narrative: The Godfather trilogy; Boyz n the Hood; The Rapture (I really want to see that one again but it's not available, grrr)

Well, it's a game anyone can play. I found M. Barzun to be a very stimulating companion.

[Christine Sunderland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, concise, brilliant analysis of how art has replaced religion in the last century. I now understand why so much of "modern" art I find bewildering, depressing, and offensive. The arrogance of the cult of art - those in the know - is also revealed for what it is. This book is a happy vindication of my instincts about the entire question of modernity. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand today's culture.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to begin this review by saying I am a huge fan of Jacques Barzun. After being introduced to him through reading Dawn of Decadence when it was published I have read as many of his books as I can find. He has an acute sense of culture and history and is a straight forward writer. I was not disappointed in this book. There are six chapters that were each a lecture given as part of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Barzun has insights into the development of modern art that seem right on. I teach an omnibus class that discusses art and I learned so much by reading this book that I can't wait to share in class. I do wonder what further insights Barzun has about art since 30 plus years have passed since he wrote it in 1973. If you are interested in the state of art and wonder how we got to the point we are today read it for some thought provoking ideas

[Maxwell Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really managed to crystallize a bunch of scattered ideas swirling around in my head about why art is so fucked up, and why people are so fucked up too I guess. The ideas in this short book are quite forcefully presented meditations on, like, "the Western soul" and other abstract philosophical entities , yet all ended up feeling instinctively true to me, in a 'when-you-see-it-you-can't-not-see it' sort of way. It's as if the inscrutable people we know of as art-lovers and artists have clumsily dropped their scripts and notes and now we can pick the mess up off the floor and read it all to figure out exactly what these guys are all about.

I'll do my best to summarize the thesis here as simply as I can:

At some point in the midst of the age of Enlightenment, thoughtful souls began to feel that there needed to be something in life to guide us beyond rationality and empiricism, yet few wanted to go back to the old religious ways. Art (with a capital A) was settled on as encapsulating what this supra-rational force should be.

Therefore, the production of Art was held to be desirable for its own sake. The idea was that the creation of beauty would in hope reflect images of a more desirable world, which would eventually guide us into bringing that world about.

This lead to a new, unspoken self-propagating ideology transmitted through works of Art, which preached that

1. The world as it is is ugly, flawed, and imperfect
2. To make the world a better place, art should be consumed and created
3. The pursuit of rational, utilitarian ends should be eschewed

The problem is that this idea just doesn't work - looking at beautiful pictures all day will not solve our pressing moral problems.

Rather than give up the fight, however, each successive generation of artists inevitably doubles down on their beliefs, leading to the whole history of modern art going deeper and deeper into the ugly, depressing, irrelevant, bizarre, etc. The previous generation of art didn't transform our forsaken world into an aesthetic utopia, therefore we need to go deeper into revealing the world itself as ugly and abhorrent, we need to go deeper into emphasizing the irrational... etc. Eventually leading to the baffling, ruinous state of contemporary art today.

This is an interesting thesis to me. It seems very intuitive to me when looking at the contemporary art scene that This Is Not How It Should Be, that there is a sort of natural organic impulse in the human system to create art, but today's artists have deviated from it drastically, so drastically that almost everything that comes out of their mouth when they try to talk about art seems wrong, as if they are approaching the problem entirely the wrong way...

This sense that we've left a healthy way of living and gone horribly wrong somehow naturally has us looking for a Fall, an erroneous historical decision to which we can give blame for the whole trajectory. It's easy to find these scapegoats - Marxism is a good one, non-representation is another, but what this book implies is that the Fall is synonymous with the invention of the concept Art itself. It truly is a Biblical narrative - it's man (as artist) becoming self-conscious which lead him to bite the apple of knowledge and be expelled from the garden.

This means that any artist who may dream of restoring Art to its former glory is in an entirely wrong place - looking to Art for salvation makes you the problem in the first place.

[Toran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best work of cultural criticism I've ever read. Most of the time I pick up something that tries to analyze culture its filled with obvious cliches and a whole lot of "well that whole chapter did nothing but explain the obvious", but not this book. The Use and Abuse of Art penetrates right into the heart of how we look at, looked at, and may yet look at Art and other major cultural institutions like Science and Politics. Just about every single paragraph made me stop reading and think about what was being said and the full extent of the insights it offered. If I was more well versed on the classic authors from centuries past that Barzun casually namedrops frequently I imagine I would have gotten even more still from this book but as it stands its still an easy 5/5 for me.

If everyone who wanted to write professionally about Art had to read this book first we would surely speak about Art in a much better way than we do now.

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

These half century old AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts are even more relevant today as we err into anti-art (witness the recent kerfuffle about Michelangelo's David). Here are my notes for my AP Art History class
The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun

P.6 [cultural criticism] As a student of cultural history, I shall be dealing with art primarily as a single force in modern life.
Art is one great institution with a high consciousness of itself as a vested interest.
P.7 For even though art today is a public institution, it is an institution without a theory. No coherent thought exits as to its aim or raison d’etre
P17 Interesting v Beautiful, Profound, Moving
P20 The third and last role commonly assigned to art is that of lifting the suffering individual out of is misery into the pure world of estetic fulfillment … The crudest entertainment takes people out of themselves, to a better place. For the more thoughtful, high art provides an Aristotelian catharsis of the emotions.
P.21 …it is dangerous because while we tend to venerate art as one great and good thing, its various uses are most often antagonistic: art can dignify and exalt the civilization that gives it birth and also weaken and destroy it.. Art can serve the revolution or can detach an individual from the struggles of his age, making loyal citizenship appear to him as futile and perverse as revolutionary action.
P.22 It was that overrated sentimentalist Albert Camus who said that “only artists have never harmed mankind.” The truth is, we do art no honor and no justice when we represent it as invariably humane , heroic and disinterested in its intentions, exclusively good in its effects, and thus not subject to reproach or accountability– sacred.
P.26 This power of art to evoke the transcendent and bring about this unity is wat has led artists and thinkers in the last two centuries to equate art and religion, and finally to substitute art for religion.
P.29 [Schiller] Still describing genius, he makes in passing a notable remark: genius, he thinks, is intelligent and modest and always true to itself, but not decent, “because corruption alone is decent.” Ten Schiller names Dante, Raphael, Durer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Fielding among others, as confirmation of that passing remark, which we may modernize by saying that genius is never bourgeois and respectable. In that conviction lies the origin of the war between artist and society.
P.30 Art, then, is the gateway to the realm of spirit for all those over whom the old religions have lost their hold. Most Romantic artists needed noting higher. Art was sufficient and supreme.
P.31 Art acquired its emotional autonomy about the same time as religious feeling, giving currency to the new idea of “the esthetic.”
P.32 In antiquity, when Hellenistic civilization had developed a sophisticated taste for collecting and treasuring art, there does not seem to have been much awareness of its intellectual value, let alone spiritual. Execution and invention were admired, but idea , though doubtless perceived, was not consciously grasped. The famous statement that Phidias, the sculptor of gods and goddesses, must have been taken up to Olympus to live among them was but a poetic conceit. As for the work of poets and dramatists, its ostensible value was informative and moralistic.
When in the Christian era art began again to serve religion, its use was likewise illustrative and instrumental. The colors in a painting often had symbolic meanings
P.33 …it required the Renaissance glorification of man, the scattering and weakening of creeds by the Protestant Reformation, and the general unbelief caused by the progress of science, before art and artists could achieve their present position in the world of intellect.The goal and spur of religious faith had to be withdrawn from eternity and rediscovered in nature or the human breast
P.34 This power possessed by genius, as we heard from Schiller, lies in his being wole, uncorrupted, and hence not “decent”. He tells the truth like a child, undeterred by respectability. Inevitably the artist stands apart. Like the Shaman of primitive religions, he is lonely and avoids the routines of life, protecting by isolation its mysterious powers, which would harm ordinary men. Curiously, as with us, this wonder-worker is held superior to the chief of the tribe.
P.35 Now, as soon as that relation becomes accepted and talked about, the artist begins to develop self-consciousness about his “religious” role, which he thinks ought to be matched by social influence… Rather, like a Hebrew prophet fulminating against the established order, in it but not of it, his mission is to moralize the world.
P.37 The dogma that daily life is trivial, coupled with a denunciation of those who do not agree, has been repeated innumerable times by artists and their advocates, not with regret but with scorn.
P.42 To the eye of the artist, much more than to the clerical moralist, Victorian respectability and conventional morals were shams hiding vast social sores.
P.48 … the adversary position of art toward society reached its apogee in the late eighties and nineties of the last century. Art in the earlier time had, as we know, criticized and preached, hoping to moralize the world; the closing decade ended by giving it up for lost.
P.51 The intellectual agitation surrounding art, energized by the reflex of negation, produces a self-renewing avant-garde. Its purpose is to destroy both academic art and te art of the previous avant-garde.
Novelty by negation means defeating expectation and being careful to call the result unconventional, offbeat, interesting, which is with us an unfailing recommendation
P.56 As any art creates a new world for the beholder to embrace, it creates intolerable discomfort, it deepend disgust for the actual world. The horror is that no matter how powerful one’s imagination, as long as one is sane, the ordinary world remains only partly displaced by art.
P.57 The Comic Spirit has always abused the world with ridicule and invective, but not until the flowering of our modern art did uncontrolled rage in vituperation and (it must be said) in spluttering sophomoric insult too, find their way into works of artistic pretensions, which in time became models and precedents.
P.62 [Elie Faure, History of Art] “ There is in a democracy only one aristocrat, the artist. That is why he is hated. That is why democracies idolize the slave that belongs to them body and soul, the one who has forgotten his noble task, given up love and gone in for producing the easy art which suits the cultivated classes… Even when he is famous, hated, and manhandled by the mobs of the salons, by the art lovers and the critics, even when he forces his way into the Academy or the great schools, the artist is alone.
P.64 We might conclude that the artist’s vow to exterminate the bourgeois stems from the fact that nobody else is around to serve as scapegoat for the vicissitudes of Art: the aristocracy is gone. But many artists hate the masses too, in the same abstract way of scorn for their tastes and their appetites….
P.89 To be valid, the idea of redemption by art would have to be just the opposite– popular and democratic. Secular salvation, like religious, must be open to all who sek it, as Tolstoy insisted. But we know that high art is difficult and that artists themselves have tended to become technicians and specialists rather than sanctified believers… Real artists are not redeemed and continue to curse the world. They feel the flames of Hell and not the felicities of Heaven.
P.90 Since art brings to life in this realm of Imagination a thousand unrelated truths, art cannot be the unifier of either the individual consciousness or mankind’s spiritual beliefs. Art is inescapably Pluralistic. It thrives on diversity and knows nothing of contradiction: all its opposite truths are equally true, because its type of knowledge is knowledge of, not knowledge about.
P.94 Unfortunately revolutionary art tends to be strong in message and weak in art. All the great revolutions since 1789 have given art encouragement, but evidently not of the right kind or not to the right artists. Propaganda art has proved ineffectual as art, and the exceptions have confirmed the rule by being ineffectual as propaganda, the message being lost in the excitement of art.
P.100 The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth.
P.126 That invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting. It obtains even when it is not immediately visible; and it dominates the field through a division of labor… Art re-exhibits it [the common experience] in some mood– anger, contempt, derision, indignation or no less eloquent impassivity. Art knows best what we are like.
P.141 Artistic forms wear out. Nothing more can be squeezed out of the intentions or techniques. After their full positive exploitation, the subtle art of allusion, parody, and inversion also gives out. There is then nothing to do except declare bankruptcy. That is the meaning of anti-art.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely-crafted essays on the way we've defined "art" in the past couple of centuries and on what we've expected from art--- redemption, social change, social definition. Barzun is speaking to a general audience, and the collected essays here (originally given as lectures in the mis-1970s) are presented without illustrations, so there's a feeling here of being left without concrete examples, but Barzun's knowledge of art history is sweeping, and his ability to relate changes in how art is defined and used to changes in technology and its own social standing is unmatched.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art, art, everywhere is art! With the enlarged and accelerating proliferation of would-be and so-called works of art has gone a corresponding decreasing and declining capacity for being able to react strongly either as an individual or as a culture to the work of art, be it recent, be it ephemeral, or be it classical and famed. That at least is one of the conclusions at which Barzun arrives in this series of lectures. It is always a pleasure to read a thoughtful piece by a learned scholar, because even when one disagrees or is lost at sea trying to figure out what is being argued or said, one is treated to thoughtful examples, allusions, and illustrations. Among other conclusions Barzun steers the reader into is that art is unable to bear the burden of culture-redeemer that the contemporary era has foisted upon it. He also is ambivalent about the culture-critical, even nihilistic tendencies of much art in the past 150 years--on the one hand, he thinks there has been a lamentable turn away from the idea that art has something to do with ordinary life, but on the other, he thinks the exhaustion of older forms of art may portend inventions and artistic expressions that really do move the culture forward in life-affirming ways. Hope is not abandoned; we are not yet in Hell--perhaps.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Barzun, I read this book because I love reading his sentences. In my view, Barzun, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Curtis White, Margaret Atwood, John McPhee, et al., are writers whose clarity of expression improves the reading experience. I suppose this might be interpreted as a disclaimer and I am fine with that.

The six lectures on Art by a historian have a sweep and range that provide a mature perspective. I particularly liked reading the lectures on Art as Redeemer and Art in the Vacuum of Belief. In most cases, I found Barzun's teachings informative of course, but also engaging.

In the final chapter, however, he stoops toward cynicism and I thought it calloused. In the 20th Century, the trench warfare of the Great War and later the nuclear and massive destruction of the Second War scarred artistic psyche in a variety of ways. The thinkers and artists (who of course are the same people) who express frustration with these destructive realities still have incredible merit.

[Antonius Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. Jacques Barzun has such a unique perspective, not only because of his lifelong scholarly achievement but because of the childhood experiences of art and artists at a time that was so different than our current day. Art nowadays can be intimidating, hard to understand. This book is a great short read to bring some clarity on the subject through the lectures that are still very relevant today.

[Ске · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely marvelous, a must read!

[Castles · Rating 3 out of 5]

in short, artistic conservatism. Lecture number 5 is specifically an interesting historical and philosophical manifesto.

[Pieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book includes a number of lectures by Mr Barzun to the National Galery (London) in which he shares his ideas about art. It is an intellectual voyage with lots of statements to overthink.

The author cites Ruskin that a great nation produces great art. After all, all else passes, but art alone endures. It can shape the minds and emotions of men as well as enlarge their imagination. Great art thrills and helps to learn about oneself, the other and the world. Next to that, art cannot be divorced from moral and social significance. Art is not neutral and will thrive when there is a unity between state and religion since the latter helps emotions and symbols to converge. Art shows direction and embodies the divine. It is the gateway to the spirit, the enlargement of nature. To prove his point, Barzun quotes Hegel, Berlioz and Goethe who all confirm the interconnectivity between nature, religion and art.

Since the age of science, protestantism and renaissance, the artist no longer preaches accepted morality, but claims its own "higher" morality. Art is no longer instrumental and illustrative to religion. Ruskin and Newman believe that religion can oppose materialism, positivism and the reduction of human life. But Nietzsche's transvaluation of values encouraged like Shaw and Ibsen to break with tradition. Barzun refers to an all male cast of the play "Trojan Women". Whereas the Romantics tried to imitate high art, other art movements simply led to decadence. Symbolism removes nature, is non-objective and reductive. Naturalism (Zola, Courbet) is obscene and urges rather to bruise than to bring catharsis. Functionalist architecture reduces buildings and houses to being functional, whereas architecture is typically multifunctional. T.S. Eliott once said that art is a simplification of life into something rich and strange. According to Barzun, minimal art is then just a short circuit. He sees similarities between modern art and science as both claim to be universal and eternal by using statistical, mathematical and abstract methods. E.g.: poetry has turned into a form of structure, but is no longer about literature and emotions. The standard is no longer the link to mankind or to imitate nature. No need to say that Mr Barzun regrets this trend in art.

[P.S. Carrillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking but at times difficult to follow, Barzun's massive intellect overwhelms. The book which consists of a series of lectures could have been dramatically enhanced by illustrations and images of the art styles referenced. Thankfully post modern art lacks so completely in imagination, it didn't make much difference when he was speaking to it. My takeaway from the book, very simply put is that a society's Art reflects back what is stirring in the collective consciousness. While the West was redefining itself after the fall of Rome with the new ideology of Christianity, Art thrived and had tremendous power. The Art of Europe (painting, architecture, poetry, drama) was Church mandated and paid for. An artist with talent could thrive throughout the centuries creating Art that was new and grand. The collective imagination of Europe was in a state of wonder and Man's relationship with the Universe was new territory to be explored. But with the death of God in the nineteenth century, all fascination with the transcendent died too. Man was now adrift as an isolated imperfect creature unloved and disposable to an indifferent Universe. What great Art could possibly come out of that? Barzun ends his last lecture on a hopeful note that somehow in the distant future, Man will find new inspiration to create new Art forms. I doubt it. The best of ourselves was shown to us by the great Masters of long ago. Modern Art can only reflect our pitiable state. Not much incentive to go gallery hopping.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moderately difficult read, but very much a classic! This author is clear and concise about how we use and abuse art and how art uses and abuses us, at times. Barzun is a comprehensive historian with years of experience in studying the zeitgeist of societies. In reading this book, I discovered my own definition of art, which will help me to understand what I like and do not like. I will read again and again.

[Aaron Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have trouble digesting art criticism. Maybe some of the things talked about in this book will sink in and inform me. By the time that happens in the future, I will be unable to say whether or not they came from this book or from other mysterious sources....

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

For everyone who is an artist. Gives you a clear perspective of what Art is!

[Sarah Dawn]

Really compelling and convincing