I’ve mentioned several times before how much I enjoy Times columnist James Marriott’s newsletter “Cultural Capital”. I’ve bought several books on his recommendation and added many more to my wanted list. One of these was this book, What Good Are The Arts, by Oxford literature professor John Carey. Carey was alive when I bought the book in the autumn of last year, but sadly died at the age of 91 on the 11th December, which made the reading rather poignant. It was published in 2005. I bought this hardback copy from eBay for next to nothing. It’s a small book, but still a relatively decent read at 260 pages.

Carey divides the book into two parts. The first part features chapter headings as a list of questions he puts in order to answer the title question “what good are the arts?”. I’m going to review the book by looking at his answers to each question in turn and then giving my opinion.

“What is a work of art?” The first chapter kicks off with an attempt at definition. Throughout the book Carey does what any scholar should do and look at examples of previous attempts to answer the question in hand. He does a good job of demolishing the examples he gives, pointing out that art too subjective for one person’s definition to be definitive. He then gives his own, very unsatisfactory, definition, “Art is anything anyone has ever described as art.” Really John? That is so open as to be meaningless. Language is a communication protocol. We all have to tacitly agree on definitions of words for language to work. The word “art” in common parlance is very context dependent. If I said I was going to take you to an “art gallery”, you would be very surprised if we ended up at the opera. You’d expect a room with paintings on the walls, or maybe some sculpture. If it was a modern conceptual exhibition, some bits and pieces that someone had curated that we could probably agree “isn’t really art.” If I described something as “a work of art” it could be anything, a cake, a garden shed. If it was a painting, you’d think I was being facetious. So yes, a “work of art” is almost anything that isn’t normally considered “art”.

“Is ‘high’ art superior?” Carey describes various attempts over the years to define ‘high’ art and why it should be considered superior to folk, popular, or commercial art. He’s quite dismissive of such attempts, cataloguing a long series of quite awful unsupportable snobbery. I would go even further and say that so called ‘high’ art is nothing more that in-group elite signalling and actually has to be “bad” art - not pleasurable to most normal people - in order to provide its exclusionary effect. An interesting thought experiment is to imagine a world with only ‘high’ art; and I mean modern elite-art here. How horrible that would be: boring a-tonal modern classical music with not a melody in sight. Meaningless word-soup modern poetry, impossible to read. Dull, repetitive abstract art of badly painted canvasses with as little effort applied as possible. Bleak slab-like buildings - oh no, wait, that is the world we live in. It wouldn’t be peasant. But then if elite art was pleasant everyone would like it and it wouldn’t have that exclusionary effect. When you go to an art gallery and see a pointless piece of abstract art that you don’t like, the implication is always that you are not sophisticated, not elite enough to appreciate it.

“Can science help?” Here he investigates whether science has anything to say about art. Predictably the answer is no. He describes some rather pointless sounding experiments which look at MRI scans of the brain as test subjects look at different images, but they are predictably inconclusive. It’s rather like measuring the temperature of different bits of a computer to try and work out how a 3D game is rendered. Utterly pointless. Now of course the brain is a physical object evolved to help us survive. There’s probably something in our reward function that fires on certain inputs. Art: decoration, painting, music, dance, literature, is found in almost all cultures, so the urge to produce and consume it must be to some extent innate. At some point when we have a better understanding of how the brain does actually work, then science may have something to say, but until then the answer to Carey’s question has to be “no”.

“Do the arts make us better?” Here Carey means morally better, rather than better after an illness. He talks of various government initiatives to support the arts and is quite dismissive of The Arts Council in the UK because it focuses on subsidising elite art, such as Covent Garden opera, rather than encouraging greater participation in the arts. He’s very supportive of programmes to bring art into deprived areas and prisons and gives some examples from one programme which seemed to have positive outcomes. Does producing or consuming art make you a “better person”? He’s a little cynical about this giving the example of Jean Paul Getty, famous art collector, miser, and a generally unpleasant man. Carey goes off on a tangent here talking in rather uninformed terms about international inequalities, saying something confused about making art while people in poor countries are starving. It’s all a bit hair-shirt.

“Can Art be a religion?” Carey seems to forget the question in this chapter and instead returns to his thoughts on whether art can make us better. He describes at length Adolf Hitler’s great love of art, and how he tried to raise it to an almost religious status in the Third Reich. I don’t think anyone would argue that it made Hitler a better person, but it did serve to give a strong visual image and glamorise the Nazi ideology. So yes, art can support religion - just look at Christianity - but it’s never really a religion itself. He obviously likes the prison reform programme because he returns to it again here even though it’s got little to do with the religion argument.

In the second part of the book Carey makes the case for literature being superior to the other arts because it can serve as a store of ideas, thoughts, and stores in a way that the visual arts or music can not. An unsurprising argument from a professor of literature. He’s stating the obvious. Of course literature is the art of language and language is the human communication protocol, used to exchange mental models, so of course it has greater fidelity for this than the other arts. It’s a different thing, and it’s simply an accident of culture that we use the umbrella term “art” in the academic sense to mean “anything that’s not a science”. It’s like saying a rake is better than a toaster. Better for collecting fallen leaves, but if you want some breakfast…

There is a very interesting final chapter on literature and indistinctness that I really enjoyed, but it felt like a stand-alone essay irrelevant to the subject of the book. Carey gives a range of examples from Shakespeare and other writers to show how indistinct, vague, and confusing language can summon quite dramatic images and mental states. It gave me a new appreciation for poetry. I’m a rather matter-of-fact man and I’m usually impatient with overly poetic writing, but maybe I’m approaching it from the wrong angle; rather than trying to conjure concrete meaning from a poem, better to let it sit unresolved?

As you can tell, I did enjoy reading Carey’s book, but agreed with very little he had to say. The indistinctness he relishes so much is feature of his own writing. He poses a question and then rambles off to talk about something else. It’s rather like a happy evening spent with an eccentric uncle who’s had a glass or two too many. But he writes very well, as you’d expect from an Oxford English professor, and I enjoyed his many examples and anecdotes and having my thought provoked. My biggest issue with the book though, is that it never once looked up and noticed the huge, mammoth, elephant in the room: pleasure. “What Good Are The Arts?” They are good because they give us pleasure John. Our society produces art of all kinds in prodigious amounts because we like it; we enjoy it. We love to look at a great picture, we love to listen to music, or read a good book. It’s a huge part of being human and any society that tries to suppress art is a bleak and sad place. This country welcomed the return of Charles II after the reign of Cromwell simply because his pious protestant Taliban made it such a grim unpleasant place. So the good of the arts is that they are good, and a bellwether of healthy society.