What Good Are the Arts? [Hardcover]

John Carey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2006 | ISBN-10: 019530554X | ISBN-13: 978-0195305548

Hailed as "exhilarating and suggestive" (Spectator), "thought-provoking and entertaining" (David Lodge, Sunday Times), and "incisive and inspirational" (Guardian), What Good are the Arts? offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--here cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgments about art are anything more than personal opinion. 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. 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 "anyone seriously interested in the arts should read" (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"People in the West have been saying extravagant things about the arts for two and a half centuries," sighs Carey, Professor of English at Oxford and eminent critic, at the outset of this witty and irreverent dismissal of cultural elitism, his second (The Intellectuals and the Masses). A work of art is whatever the experts agree on? Not so, says Carey, declaring instead that a work of art is "anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art." Well surely some art is "superior" to others? But again Carey demurs, finding so-called high art to be "culturally constructed" at best, and "spectacularly wrong," "self-deluding" and "catastrophic" at worst. To illustrate, Carey finds parallels between terrorists and those who defend high art on grounds of its purity and depth (both pit themselves against Western popular culture). In another passage, Carey cripples the argument that art appreciation creates emphatic and thoughtful people by remembering Hitler's "intense" love of opera and architecture. In Part Two, Carey argues the "supremacy" of literature in the same extravagant terms he just debunked (reading "has the power to change people"). Regrettably, despite clever logic and inexhaustible imagination, Carey fails to recover artistic merit from "the abyss of relativism." Perhaps, as Carey suggests, relativism is all we can hope for in world perceived by over 6 billion minds a day.
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Review

"An intensely argued polemic against the intellectually supercilious, the snooty rich and the worship of high culture as a secular religion for the spiritually refined and socially heartless. Anyone seriously interested in the arts should read it."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"Smart, saucy."--Newsday

"Anyone who still insists on lecturing us about 'high' culture and its superiority to 'mass' culture should be made to read John Carey's 'What Good Are the Arts?'.... Carey defines art, tells us what it's good for and has enormous fun dismantling the claims of aesthetic theorists, from Kant onward. It's been a long time since I've read a saner book." --Nick Hornby, Favorite Book of 2005 selection, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Brilliant, funny, and insightful.... Makes a compelling and persuasive case that creative expression--especially the written word--is absolutely central to a rich and thoughtful life."--New York Post

"Exhilarating and suggestive.... Professor John Carey is at his most acerbic, combative and impassioned in this brilliant polemic."--Rupert Christiansen, Spectator

"An informative, thought-provoking and entertaining book on a subject that rarely produces writing with all three qualities."--David Lodge, Sunday Times

"Brilliantly stimulating and timely."--Helen Meany, Irish Times

"Engaged, provocative and frequently funny."--Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph

"Incisive and inspirational.... How interesting it would be if Careys anti-elitist values were adopted and put into practice. Next time the post of chair of the Arts Council becomes vacant, someone ought to nominate him."--Blake Morrison, Guardian

"Brilliant, erudite and often hilarious.... Carey has already been voted one of Britain's top public intellectuals. What Good Are The Arts? should enhance and cement that reputation."--Julian Baggini, Sunday Herald

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019530554X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195305548
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,179,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No easy answers but an extremely good question, September 5, 2005

By 

Penhoet "Penhoet" (Nova Scotia Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Good Are the Arts? (Hardcover)

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

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

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

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I Know What I Like, March 24, 2009

By 

E. Bramwell (Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Good Are the Arts? (Hardcover)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Apologia for the Canon, October 9, 2010

By 

Donald Knowles Richardson - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Good Are the Arts? (Paperback)

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

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

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

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

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

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