Books
The popular touch. Is it possible to distinguish "high" culture from "low" culture? Is one better than the other? Terry Eagleton on a generous polemic that fails to hit all its targets
Published 20 June 2005
What Good Are the Arts?
John Carey Faber & Faber, 304pp, £12.99
ISBN 0571226027
John Carey is the most drily sardonic of critics, a relentless debunker of pious guff and portentous rhetoric. As a champion of the commonplace and a devout egalitarian, he has waged a ferocious war on cultural snobbery and emotional elitism; and in this bravely iconoclastic book he comes out of retirement from his Oxford chair to fight a fresh battle in the campaign. He also has a sharper social conscience than is usually to be found in Oxbridge senior common rooms. What use are the arts, he demands, in a world in which billions live on less than $2 a day while Europe spends $105bn each year on alcoholic drinks alone?
One time-worn answer is that the arts make us better people. And yet the evidence for this moral transformation, as Carey points out, is remarkably fragile. A devotion to Goethe and Beethoven has proved not incompatible with the administration of genocide. Hitler was immensely preoccupied with artistic culture - indeed, the first building he ever erected as German chancellor was a huge art gallery. "High" art has always been part of the symbolic capital amassed by the wealthy and powerful. Even the ancient cave artists, some historians now argue, may have been pulling rank on their more symbolically challenged Neanderthal colleagues.
As industrialism gradually undermined religious values, along with their ideological power, it proved necessary to find a substitute for this most astonishingly successful of all symbolic systems; and from the Romantics onwards, it was known as culture. Most aesthetic concepts are theological ideas in disguise. Hence the religious, pseudo-transcendent language in which art has so often been discussed in these distinctly non-transcendent modern times.
It is this sham sacredness that Carey sets out to discredit, armed with his Orwellian values of decency, common sense and humanity. Yet these robustly English virtues have their limits, too, as this book unwittingly demonstrates. Carey begins by claiming that a work of art is basically anything you think is one - a case long argued by theorists of whom he seems unaware. This is true in one sense and false in another. It is true that what we call works of art (a pretty recent idea, incidentally, that would have come as a surprise to Shakespeare) have few or no objective features in common; it is hard to see how a Rembrandt self-portrait and "Mr Tambourine Man" resemble each other. A work of art is any object framed so as to evoke a certain kind of response and attentiveness. Art is not a special class of things, but a special way of relating to things. To cut up the telephone directory on the page is to invite us to treat it with less brisk utility than we do when looking up a number.
Carey, however, concludes from this that art is just a subjective matter. He does not see that saying, "This is what I call a work of art" is possible only if I already have a concept of art; and this concept, like any other, is not private but public. He is, in fact, an old-fashioned Cartesian dualist, of the sort that almost every eminent philosopher from Ludwig Wittgenstein onwards has had fun in demolishing. He believes that experience is inherently private, that the consciousness of others is inaccessible to us. Perhaps he has not heard of language - or indeed of art. What else is art but the public sharing of intensely personal experience? For this book, however, we are all eternally cut off from one another by the thick walls of our bodies. All judgements are therefore relative. It is unclear whether this applies to condemning genocide as well as commending Dante.
Ironically, this is the sort of tragic individualism that was once touted by an elite of modernist writers - writers whom the democratically minded Carey, with more than a touch of English parochialism, detests. His theory of knowledge is at odds with his politics. But the two can also be craftily hooked together. If we cannot compare our experiences, then the devotees of Mozart can't tell fans of Madonna that they are unspeakable troglodytes. So what is really an elitist vision is pressed into the defence of mass culture.
What Good Are the Arts? is an unabashed apologia for "low" culture and a full-blooded assault on the higher kind. Carey, however, does not actually challenge the distinction; instead, he simply stands it on its head: "low" is now good and "high" is now darkly suspect. Quite how this breathtakingly absolute judgement squares with his laid-back relativism, it is hard to see. The obvious truth he overlooks is that the good/bad dichotomy cuts across the high/low axis. There is both trashy and valuable high art, just as there is both kitschy and precious popular culture. Carey also does not see that to dismiss rankings as elitist is itself elitist. The common folk he champions do it all the time, arguing the relative merits of Neighbours and The Office. Only the sentimental populism of the liberal don could ignore this fact.
In any case, a distaste for elites and for Romantic genius, and a crying up of the commonplace, are nothing like as subversive as Carey seems to imagine. They are the common currency of postmodern capitalism. Nothing is more egalitarian than the commodity. Thus, much of the time, the book smacks at straw targets. Just who are these sanctimonious types for whom art has a transcendent value? There are a lot more Tracey Emins around the place than there are George Steiners. Carey hits at the fat cats of the corporate high arts, but passes in silence over the fat cats of Fox and News International, who exploit cultural deprivation. He defends violence and sensationalism in "low" culture as drawing upon instincts that were evolutionarily essential - a high-minded Darwinian apologia for snuff movies, Hustler magazine and woman-hating rap that only an academic mind could conceivably have come up with.
Carey's book, like any other, makes judgements all the time, despite cutting the ground for these opinions from under its own feet. Indeed, the second half of the study argues vigorously for the superiority of literature over the other arts. Aware of some possible inconsistency here, Carey insists that this judgement of his is just "subjective". But this is a logical evasion. To hold an opinion is to make an implicit claim to truth, one that is by its nature publicly contestable. Otherwise, one would not hold the opinion in the first place. To say that "literature is better than painting", a statement which appeals to the rational grounds of argument, is not the same as saying, "I like the smell of boot polish."
The book is not without its contradictions. We should distrust high art, but encourage schoolchildren to play every instrument in the orchestra. We should stand up for equality and social justice; yet going by Carey's view, these must surely be purely subjectivist preferences for which no rational case can be advanced. It is a myth to believe that the arts make us better people; but the book ends by claiming that they enlarge the mind - which does not sound all that different.
John Carey is one of the few dons to have made the transition from cloistered academic to public intellectual. This book, with its sweeping devaluation of minority art and its promiscuous celebration of the popular, is something of a caricature of that shift. It has the indiscriminate zeal of the communist who comes over to the free market. In fact, the relativist is usually the disenchanted offspring of the absolutist. However, to invert a dichotomy such as "high" and "low" culture is not to transform it. It is to remain its prisoner. The two go toge-ther like Laurel and Hardy.
It is to Carey's undying credit that he subjects the cultural mandarins to such withering scorn, not least given that he has been surrounded by them for half a century. Oxford academics are not remarkable for such passionate devotion to common humanity, but neither are they remarkable for their talent for cultural generalisation. Indeed, they have sneered at such generalities for centuries. Carey does not do this; but he approaches such momentous questions with the handicap of a traditional Oxford education, which trains its pupils in the microscopic rigours of scholarship, rather than the moral visions that have been more characteristic of Cambridge. What Good Are the Arts? is a wonderfully generous-spirited po-lemic; yet it is hard not to feel that it has bitten off more than it can chew.
Terry Eagleton's two most recent books are After Theory (Penguin) and The English Novel (Blackwell)
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