What Good Are the Arts?

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A Nose Tweak - Rated
The funniest book I have read this year. Carey tweaks the nose of the urban elites, and their earnest country cousins at 'arts centre' mission stations, he tweaks it until it hurts, and then he still won't let go.

If your idea of the arts coresponds with the cultural taste of the metroploitan pivileged class, then read this, you deserve an intellectual nose pinch. If not, read it anyway.

A knockabout but no knockout - Rated
Carey is funny and incisive, and certainly a critique of the Visual Arts, with its intellectual pretensions and creative stasis is overdue. Attacks on the quasi-religious status of 'the Arts' are welcome, as it is this sort of thing that protects the banal under the guise of improvement. However, some parts of the case are put poorly (not many, for example, would recognise Kant from the account that is put here), and the attempt to create a distinction between art and craft is partly to blame for the mythic status of the Arts. The definition offered of Art is not really viable (and wouldn't be proffered if he understood Kant a little better). Kant's point is that Beauty is applied as a universal label to certain works, in other words, as a cultural value, and that it is precisely the appropriateness of the assertion that is the stuff to argue about.

The worst of it is the patronising English lesson offered in Chapter 6. Notwithstanding the partisan argument for lit., Carey doesn't seem to be aware of the undercurrent of internal critique that accompanies most of the arts: people don't just make the stuff to please themselves, they also do it to spite a few others.

However, this is great knockabout stuff. As Adorno (selectively quoted in this book) said, 'the object of art is to end art', and as such, Carey hasn't quite managed it here.

A Joy to Read From Beginning to End - Rated
This book is a sheer joy from start to finish, full of sharp insights, written in sparse, elegant prose - astringent and beautiful and easy to read. I was so taken with it that I kept slowing myself down in order not to get to the end of it too quickly! Also, it's such a counterblast to the armies of literary and artistic snobs out there (some well known novelists included) - and from such an erudite, well read source as well. It's hugely funny, wise, iconoclastic and may well change your life. It should be required reading for anyone with any involvement in the arts, but perhaps most particularly for would-be critics (and Arts Council Committees!) everywhere. I loved it, and only wish I had half such facility with words and ideas. Buy it, read it, savour it.

Hilarious, but internally contradictory - Rated
It's hard not to love John Carey. There are so few witty, intelligent literary critics willing to stand up for the general reader. As ever, this offering is rich in pointed and thoughtful deflations of the smug, the pompous and the self-important, and the result is rib-tickling and heartwarming.

However, it isn't always illuminating, because Carey's critical judgement is sometimes overwhelmed by his flair for apt phrases and putdowns, and because of the stark contradiction at the heart of the book. Having spent several chapters wittily dissecting the pretensions of high culture in the form of the visual and musical arts, he abruptly tells us that literature is different because it alone is self-critical. Huh? Modern art - since Matisse, at least - is vehemently self critical to the point of being self-consuming, constantly lampooning its own status. There's an intriguing argument about literary language actually being vague and suggestive rather than precise, but one could use this just as well to defend Vaughan Williams or Kandinsky. Somehow, Carey wants to cut Dickens a lot more slack than anyone else, despite the fact that he too could be as snobbish as anybody.

If you can live with all these contradicitons, however, you can enjoy Carey's own lacerating wit as itself the kind of literary pleasure he wants to defend.