Faber £12.99 pp286
Regular readers will know that John Carey is that rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly, wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects in a style that non-specialists can understand and appreciate. There is a principle, central to the British tradition of philosophical discourse, known as Occam’s Razor, which forbids the unnecessary multiplication of facts. Carey’s favourite argumentative tool is more like a machete. He has a ruthlessly logical mind that cuts through obscurity, pretension, fallacious reasoning and unsupported assertion, and he has a knack of summarising and quoting from writers with whom he disagrees to devastating effect.
The machete is much in evidence in part one of this book, where Carey tackles the question raised in his title by posing a series of sub-questions: What Is a Work of Art? Is High Art Superior? Can Science Help? Do the Arts Make Us Better? Can Art Be a Religion? His answers are, in brief: anything; no; not much; not as a rule; no. Then, in part two, as if dismayed by the negativity of his own conclusions, and the havoc his blade has wrought in the jungle of aesthetic theory, he makes a modestly stated case for the superiority of literature to the other arts, implying that one of them, at least, is good for something.
In his first chapter, he traces the concept of art as an autonomous and privileged activity, producing “works” that have an essence or qualities in common, back to the idealist aesthetics of Kant, briskly dismissed as “farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion”. This tradition of aesthetic theory is biased towards “great” works of art, thus excluding much artistic production and experience. In his second chapter, Carey questions the distinction between high and low art in terms of value. He regards Jeannette Winterson’s elitist musings on art as “barely sane”, and the claim of Chris Smith, former minister for culture, in his book Creative Britain, to speak for “all of us” in claiming ecstatic experience of high art while urging tolerance of popular art, as “banal and evasive claptrap”. Carey has much more respect for Dorothy Hobson’s study of responses to the despised television soap Crossroads, which showed that its narratives were deeply meaningful to an audience, mainly women, most of whom could not be included in Smith’s “all”.
Value is certainly an unreliable basis for formally defining art, but it is at the very heart of the experience of art. Carey goes too far in forbidding us to pronounce other people’s aesthetic judgments right or wrong. As a critic, a teacher and a judge of literary prizes he must be constantly engaged in disputing other people’s aesthetic judgments. In the second half of the book, he admits that he hopes other people will be convinced by his literary criticism, but points out that this is a discourse of persuasion rather than demonstration or proof, which is the province of science.
Carey is a literary intellectual who has made it his business to understand science extremely thoroughly, and one of the most informative chapters here surveys the efforts of biologists, neurologists and evolutionary psychologists to explain the nature of art and human experience of it. Most, he sadly reports, fall into the trap of seeking some essential property of “successful” art that corresponds to some evolutionary selection process or configuration of the human brain. Art does not always succeed, or it succeeds in different ways for different people. Fascinating as they are, these scientific approaches inevitably run into the unsolved problem of consciousness in general — how to understand the connection between brain and mind.
Scientists, including social scientists, also figure in the absorbing chapter on whether consumption and appreciation of the arts make us better human beings. This question has implications for social policy: large amounts of public money are spent subsidising the arts, especially through high cultural institutions such as galleries and opera houses, on the assumption that they are good for us, refining our sensibilities, compensating for impoverished lives, and overcoming class divisions. Carey’s machete cuts great swathes through these received ideas, revealing the patronising and self-serving snobbery that often underlies them.
The fact that some of the worst Nazi war criminals, including Hitler (fascinating evidence for this coming from a book by Frederick Spott), were connoisseurs of music, visual art and architecture demonstrates that high culture does not necessarily have an ennobling effect on those who appreciate it. The writer George Steiner, who wrestled long and hard with this paradox, came to the conclusion that ultimately art cannot be justified by purely secular criteria — that it is essentially a religious activity, since the artist seeks a kind of immortality through his work. Carey will have none of this: “talk of the immortality of art, in the absence of a belief in God, is childish and self- deceiving”. The only demonstrated benefit of art he can find is the therapeutic value of creative-writing programmes, drama workshops and the like in the rehabilitation of delinquent and antisocial individuals, but such initiatives, as he points out, have low priority in public funding of the arts.
The resemblances between religious practice (communal worship, pilgrimage, meditation) and the consumption of art in modern secular society are obvious, and, as the authority of the former has waned, the power and status of the latter have grown. Carey writes as a convinced materialist, and this perhaps prevents him from granting that there is an authentic human longing for transcendence behind our attraction to something that is neither necessary nor useful for mere survival. But in the second section of his book,
entitled The Case for Literature, he does attribute to that art a moral efficacy. It perhaps helps his case that the Nazis mostly cultivated the non-verbal arts. Literature, he points out, is the only art that can criticise itself, indeed the only one that can criticise anything, since its medium is language, the vehicle of rational thought, although he is surely wrong to say that literature is the only art that can moralise. What about Hogarth, for instance?
The final chapter celebrates and demonstrates literature’s “indist-inctness” — Carey’s idiosyncratic name for what other critics and theorists have called variously ambiguity, polysemy, indeterminacy; in other words, the capacity of poetic language to generate an inexhaustible but non-random supply of meaning in the consciousness of readers, a phenomenon that Carey illustrates with some perceptive critical commentaries on a variety of texts plucked from the shelves of his own well-stocked mind.
You only have to imagine the dreariness of a world without art to know that it is a good thing. The problem is to explain how and why in terms that apply to all the arts. Carey rightly points out that anything (eg, a urinal) can be a work of art if someone chooses to regard it aesthetically (eg, by putting it in an art gallery). There are however some things (Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures, for instance) that are works of art because there is nothing else for them to be. It is from that category of works (in any medium) that we learn how to treat other things as art, and this means that systematic aesthetics is not necessarily such a vain pursuit as Carey implies. But his scepticism is bracing, and his interdisciplinary range of reference impressive. This is an informative, thought-provoking and entertaining book on a subject that rarely produces writing with all three qualities.
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