Is Art Good for Us?: Beliefs about High Culture in American Life [Paperback]

Joli Jensen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0742517411 | ISBN-13: 978-0742517417 | Publication Date: May 15, 2002

Are the arts good for us? This book questions our taken-for-granted assumptions about the transformational powers of high culture by critiquing an instrumental American heritage of beliefs about the arts. Jensen argues that faith in high culture's unproven ability to transform people and society allows social critics to keep faith with the idea of a democratic society while deploring popular culture. Employing perspectives from Tocqueville and Dewey, she argues that the arts are good, but they don't do good. Instead of expecting the arts to improve things (and blaming the media for ruining them) we need to recognize that it is up to us, not "the arts" to make the world a better place.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In this brilliant work, Joli Jensen speaks with the reach and range and assurance of the public intellectuals she has read so carefully. She shows that 'we have not been thinking or talking wisely or well about the arts.' Through original readings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Lewis Mumford, and John Dewey, she argues that the mass media are not so bad nor 'art' so good for us as public discourse assumes. In clear-headed, strong, and almost breathtakingly lucid prose, she helps us reconsider what we want and expect of art, criticism, and democracy. What a gift this book is! (Schudson, Michael )

Stimulating read. (Financial Times )

Its refreshing honesty and forthrightness require a solid argumentation, and Jensen delivers through a detailed examination and critique of the underpinnings of the instrumentalist position in social and art criticism through successive moments from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The integration of social criticism or analysis of artistic practice and communicative policies offers innovative and fresh insights and holds out a promise for a new direction in arts policy. This book should be required reading for those in the spheres of cultural-policy work and social criticism. Its clear and compelling message should be heeded by all of us who care about art, creativity, and democracy. (College Art Association )

Joli Jensen pulls all of the right strings in this fascinating analysis. (Taylor, Andrew Artsjournal.Com )

The bluntness of Joli Jensen's title indicates the no-nonsense approach she takes to making a public case for the arts. . . . The resulting book is, quite literally, required reading. I'm assigning this volume as the opening text for my 'Cultural Policy and the Arts' graduate seminar this semester, because it frames, historicizes, and argues the essential questions so cogently. (Ann Daly )

Joli Jensen makes an elegant case against the modern cult of art: It isn't what art purportedly does to us, but what we do with art that matters. Jensen reveals art's true significance by defending the universality of its experience. (Charles Paul Freund )

About the Author

Joli Jensen is professor of communication at the University of Tulsa.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (May 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742517411
• ISBN-13: 978-0742517417
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,381,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not as Medicine, at Least ..., May 10, 2004

By 

Valjean (Orcas Island, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Is Art Good for Us?: Beliefs about High Culture in American Life (Paperback)

Think of the expression "patron of the arts." What image comes to mind?

Whether you thought of a guilt-driven corporate sponsor of public broadcasting, a wealthy individual endowing some form of "high culture," or another image entirely you probably didn't question that "the arts" are a decidedly good thing and are highly deserving of our "support." It would follow that high culture (painting, sculpture, ballet, "serious" music) needs more support than "low" culture (movies, comic books, dreadful pop music) because, well, it's *higher* and therefore better for us. Everyone says so--and "patrons" and other art-related sponsors are especially insistent.

But what if no evidence exists that "the arts" do us any good--at least by exposure? That the idea of art-as-medicine essentially represents nothing more than a historical aspiration foisted on us by a long line of utopian intellectuals?

Welcome to Joli Jensen's argument--supremely well-articulated in 'Is Art Good for Us?' From Alexis de Toqueville's 'Democracy in America' to our present day culture wars, Jensen surveys the embattled landscape of the role of the arts in our democracy. She concludes that today's "instrumental" view (high culture good, low culture--including, of course, the demonic media--bad) not only lacks evidence but distorts our public and private view of art. And is profoundly undemocratic to boot.

The sheer novelty of this thesis--and its ramifications ranging from private expression to public funding--is reason enough to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the contentious intersection of art and politics. But Jensen doesn't stop with novelty; some very earnest believers in art's transformational powers for democracy come in for some hard knocks: Walt Whitman, Lewis Mumford, pretty much every writer at The Partisan Review. Rarely have I read anything--book, article, website--that carpet-bombs the pretension of our nation's art intelligensia quite so effectively. From historical and simple evidence-gathering perspectives, the instrumental view of the arts stands--literally--on nothing.

The book's downside arrives in the final chapter when Jensen presents her favored alternative: an "expressive" tonic for the arts, largely promulgated by John Dewey (in the "Toquevillian" tradition). Dewey focuses on art as "communication" ("the creation and maintenance of common meanings") and--at least in this analysis--doesn't define it much further. But is that all it is? High or low, art is still (hopefully!) "... distinct from the everyday"-the "'esoteric' view of art" that Dewey combats. Ultimately he falls back on the "artfulness of the everyday"--a view Jensen admits is not far from the NEA's feel-good reasoning for increased government arts funding. This makes a nice contrast, but art--the aspiration of our better selves--deserves, well, better.

Dewey aside, my only other gripe with the author entails an occasional lapse into opaque academic jargon, to the point that one can barely stay with the topic at-hand. Subtitles like "The Limits of Counterbalance" and "Rhetorical Dramas Reconsidered" (to pick two at random) are a little too frequent for a book about art with such a clear (and radical) thesis.

Fortunately these negatives don't make much of a dent in the primary arguments. "It is far too easy to reify the arts as human and liberating, damn technology as mechanistic and constraining, and anoint ourselves seers and sages." If any part of that statement resonates with you (for good or ill), by all means read this book.