Book Review No. 3 – What Good are the Arts? by John Carey

What Good are the Arts? by John Carey
 
How I discovered the book
 
I was reading a column in the ‘Literary Review’ supplement of the newspaper we buy at home many months back. The column was about interesting books that the columnist had read recently. There was mention of a book called ‘What Good are the Arts?’ by John Carey. I had heard of John Carey before because he had edited ‘The Faber book of Science’ and I had liked his introduction to the book. When I read some of the lines from ‘What Good are the Arts?’ that the columnist had quoted, I liked them and thought I will get the book. But when I enquired around in different bookshops, I realized that the book was not easily available. Finally, I went to the Oxford University Press office, and asked them whether they had a copy of the book. They said that it was there in their database, but was not readily available, and it would take a couple of months for them to procure it. I requested them to get it and wait for a couple of months. The couple of months dragged on and finally after five months, they called me and told me that the book had arrived. I was quite delighted to see the book – it had a minimalist cover design, the paper was beautiful and the font was very nice. When I went back home, I immediately read the introduction. But, unfortunately, as has always happened, I put off reading the book, as I was reading something else and the months flew by. Now, nearly five months after getting the book, I thought it is not fair to keep it waiting for so long and decided to delve into it. I finished reading it today and here is my review.
 
Summary of the book
 
I am giving below the summary of the book as given in the book flap.

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of “high art” (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects?
 
In What Good are the Arts? John Carey–one of Britain’s most respected literary critics–offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements about art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people’s aesthetic choices “mistaken” or “incorrect,” however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of “high-art advocates” such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts–objects, noises, light effects–cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art.
 
Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature.

There is an interesting description of the author too in the flap. It goes like this :

John Carey is the Chief Book Reviewer for The Sunday Times (London). He has been at various points in his life a soldier, a television critic, a bee-keeper, a bartender, and a professor of literature at Oxford.

I found one thing in the description really interesting. When I attended a talk last year by Paul Theroux at one of the book club meetings he mentioned that he was a bee-keeper. Now after reading about John Carey’s interest in bee-keeping, I am wondering why is it a fad among writers now to become a bee-keeper 🙂  
 
What I think
 
I think I wouldn’t be able to do justice to this beautiful and complex book, by writing a review about it. So I will just describe my thoughts on some of the questions and ideas that the book grapples with, and give below a few links to some good book reviews of the book.
 
What Good are the Arts? asks the question on whether a work of art can be judged good or otherwise using objective criteria and on whether the arts make people better. To answer these questions Carey poses even more fundamental questions like ‘What is a work of art?’, ‘Is there a difference between ‘high’ art and mass art and is ‘high’ art superior?’, ‘Are there objective criteria for judging a work of art?’, ‘Can science help in arriving at objective criteria for judging a work of art?’, ‘Do the arts make us better people as is often suggested by many artists and art-lovers?’ and ‘Can art be a religion?’. To answer these questions Carey looks at each of these questions in depth and goes back by a few centuries to trace the history of some of the issues related to these questions and to see what some of the leading thinkers in different eras thought about these questions. Carey’s answers to all of these questions are interesting. I am giving a summary of them below.

• What is a work of art? – Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art.
• Is there a difference between ‘high’ art and mass art? – None. Different people might get pleasure and value from different works of art. Some of the things which are regarded as ‘high’ art now, weren’t even regarded so, when they first came into being (e.g.Shakespeare’s works)
• Are there objective criteria for judging a work of art? – People have tried coming up with objective criteria starting from Immanuel Kant, but none have succeeded till now. Based on today’s knowledge, there don’t seem to be any objective criteria.
• Can science help in arriving at objective criteria for judging a work of art? – Science has tried but hasn’t really come up with anything till now.
• Do the arts make us better people? – There is no evidence to this effect. On the other hand, some of the ‘not-so-good’ people in history (e.g.Hitler) have been art lovers and artists. Art definitely didn’t help them.
• Can art be a religion? – Definitely not. Religion says that everyone is equal irrespective of their social status and wealth, but art is elitist. So it can never satisfy the needs that religion has done in the past.

Having demolished art from its high pedestal in the first part of the book, Carey proceeds to describe its value in the second part – as an activity which people can participate in and which can probably help them know themselves better. He also argues the case of literature because Carey feels that literature is the only art capable of self-criticism, reasoning and moralizing and also because literature’s ‘indistinctness’ helps readers in using their imagination and read creatively.
 
The book has been variously described as ‘anti-elitist’, ‘acerbic’ and a ‘brilliant polemic’. I liked the way Carey quotes extensively from people who have taken opposite sides, before putting forth his own point of view on every issue. I agreed with the book on its overall conclusion and in its answers to major questions. My own opinion is that art as an activity is more important than calling something ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’. But there were some details on which I didn’t agree with Carey. One of them is that Carey says that there are no objective criteria by which to judge whether one work on art is better than another and different people will judge with it differently. At one level I would like to concur with Carey on this, and at another level I would like to disagree. As someone who reads books of different types (I like both books which have ‘high-brow’ prose as well as action thrillers which are written for a popular audience) and as someone who watches movies of different types (I like the popular Hollywood / Bollywood / Kollywood ‘masala’ movies as well as the ‘fine-art’ movies of Kurosawa, Bergman, Kieslowski and others), I think it is possible to separate a good movie from a not-so-good one. I would say that it might be difficult to compare two good movies and say which one is better – I think that depends on one’s interests and would be different for different viewers – but I would say that in most cases it is possible for me to say whether a movie belongs to the ‘good’ category or the ‘not-so-good’ category. Carey might, of course, say that the quality of ‘good’ or ‘not-so-good’ is defined by me and hence is subjective and so is different for different viewers. He might be correct from a rational point of view. But my point is that I like both the popular movies as well as the fine-art movies (I am not saying that fine-art movies are better than popular movies) and in many cases I can identify a poorly-made movie. It is difficult to prove this rationally, by argument and debate, but I think it is true. Maybe it is subjective too. If it is, it just proves Carey’s point, but I am not sure whether it is subjective. So, there were some areas on which I didn’t agree with Carey, but I loved reading the book. Carey is ruthlessly rational when debating different sides of an issue and is not afraid of calling a spade, a spade. Carey’s prose is also quite nice – it doesn’t have a lot of jargon, is accessible to the intelligent layman, but is not too simple and is polished and sophisticated.
 
Excerpts
 
I have many favourite passages – the book is littered with markings of my highlighting pen now – in the book and so it was difficult to select a few here. After a lot of thought I thought I will select a few which will give a flavour of the book. Hope you enjoy reading them.

      When we say a thing is beautiful we generally mean it is beautiful to us. It is a statement of personal taste. A very elementary knowledge of how standards of beauty have changed across ages and cultures would prevent us from demanding that others should agree with us about what is beautiful. Yet for Kant, anyone using the word ‘beautiful’ correctly must require others to agree : ‘He demands it of them. He blames them if they judge otherwise.’
      This is because for Kant, standards of beauty were, at the deepest level, absolute and universal. There existed, he believed, a mysterious realm of truth, which he called the ‘supersensible substrate of nature’, where all such absolutes and universals resided. The fact that we (in Kant’s curious version of reality) think everyone ought to agree with us when we call something beautiful, is an indication (for Kant) that we are dimly aware of this mysterious realm. Kant’s belief in absolutes still persists today, at any rate in some people, if only at a subliminal level. It is this that feeds the conviction that some things just are, and some just are not, works of art.
 
      It is only among artists that genius occurs. Men of science, Kant stipulates – even highly intelligent ones like Sir Isaac Newton – do not deserve the name ‘genius’, because they ‘merely follow rules’, whereas artistic genius ‘discovers the new, and by a means that cannot be learnt or explained’.
      It is strange that this farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion should have achieved a position of dominance in Western thought. Nevertheless, that is what occured.
 
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume attempts to widen the consensus argument in this way in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. He concedes that the rules of art are not scientific, but there is, nevertheless, a true standard of taste, he insists, and it is ‘what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages’. Unfortunately a moment’s thought will tell us that there is nothing on earth that meets this criterion, except perhaps sexual intercourse and eating.
 
      Shakespeare is probably the writer that most high-art advocates would select as a universally acclaimed genius, whose reputation proves that there are indeed artistic values that surmount place and time. But even here the consensus argument breaks down, not only because there are clearly more people in today’s world ignorant of Shakespeare’s works than knowledgeable about them, but also because even among the intelligent and educated across the centuries there has never in fact been consensus about Shakespeare’s greatness. The disparaging opinions of Voltaire and Tolstoy are well known. Charles Darwin found ‘tremendous delight’ in Shakespeare as a schoolboy, but his view changed when he grew older.
      …university-educated intellectuals in Shakespeare’s own day such as Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene would have found the suggestion that he was a great writer utterly ridiculous. On the contrary they derided him as an ‘upstart’, semi-educated plagiarist, on the fringe of the literary world.
      ….None of this, of course, is a reason for thinking less of Shakespeare. But it is a reminder that talk of the ‘universal’ value of his or any art is meaningless. Nor can Shakespeare’s value be established by a ‘consensus’, whether it is organized on democratic, head-counting lines, or by restricting the ballot to intelligent and educated people across the ages. Well over a century after his death many such people did not consider his plays ‘high’ art at all. The fact they they were once popular art, despised by intellectuals, but are now high art, itself suggests that the differences between high and popular art are not intrinsic but culturally constructed. 

Further Reading
 
I am giving below links to a few interesting reviews of the book and also to some information on John Carey.

• Review in The Sunday Times – http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article526222.ece
• Review in Washington Post – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012601712.html
• Review in ‘The Guardian’ – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/11/highereducation.news
• Essay on John Carey – http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/04/art.oxforduniversity

Final Thoughts
 
I enjoyed reading the book very much. It is ‘anti-elitist’ as one of the reviewers says and at times it is ‘acerbic’. But it is also relentlessly rational and to be fair to Carey, tries to be objective. When things get into the subjective domain (when Carey argues for the case of literature), Carey says so. Many people may not agree with Carey’s views. If one is a practising artist – a writer, a painter, a musician, a theatre professional or a practitioner of any of the other creative arts – or is an arts connoisseur or an arts enthusiast and feels that art is divine with eternal values which cannot be articulated, one may not agree with most of the book’s contents. However, the book is beautifully written and I loved it from the beginning to the end. I think I will read it again sometime.  Highly recommended.