What Good are the Arts?

This book is a consideration of whether the arts improve people, and if so, in what way? It is useful to consider this when you consider the government's grants of funding towards the arts, and private investors make charitable donations of artworks and funding; what good do they think they are doing?

I was disappointed to find that I was persuaded by John Carey's arguments. I had hoped that viewing great works of art does benefit the viewer in some way: perhaps spiritually, perhaps lifting the level of the internal discourse? I wasn't sure but I would have asserted that I felt something more than mere enjoyment or pleasure when I looked at great pictures. I didn't feel that I was in some way superior to others for my liking to visit say, the old Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). I felt a thirst to see the pictures of William Blake, a longing to see more of them. As I became more knowledgeable about art I discovered there were more artists whose work I craved to see (hello Matisse. Hello Rodin.) Now I'm quite an old hand at the kind of pictures I like and understand quite a lot about them.

Blake said the human body could express everything he needed to say
A kind of choreographer, I think

*****

First of all Carey examines what an artwork is. He looks at various definitions of art. An important and lasting one was provided by Kant. "For Kant beauty was.. essentially connected with moral goodness. All aesthetic judgements are, consequently, ethical as well. "Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and that it is only in this respect", Kant admonished, "that it gives pleasure." (You can tell it is truly beautiful because you realise that it is good.)

Immanual Kant

Kant believed that creators of great art are geniuses, the special property of genius being that it allows access to the supersensible region.

Carey calls this "a farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion".

"Schopenhauer, another beneficiary of Kant's theories, made further additions to the West's notions of high art.  In pure contemplation of the aesthetic object, he claimed, the observer would entirely escape his own personality and become "a clear mirror of the inner nature of the world." By letting "his whole consciousness be filled with quiet contemplation" the observer will cease to be himself and become indistinguishable from the object. What the viewer will see is no longer the object but the Platonic object.  But this revelation was not available to everyone. Schopenhauer believed that the common person was "a blind, striving creature whose pole or focus lies in the genital organs". Those being who can attain a vision of the Platonic ideas in pure contemplation are artistic geniuses. They can be recognised by their "keen and steady glance", whereas the glance of the common mortal is "stupid and vacant"."

Schopenhauer

The idea of art as something that separates the commoner from the elite continues to have some currency. "Though generally reinforced with abstruse phraseology, their definitions are invariably reducible to the statement that works of art are things recognised as works of art by the right people, or that they are things that have the effects that works of art should rightly have."

Hmmmm.

Then, as a part of the movement or pop art in the 20th century, Andy Warhol exhibited sculptures made of Brillo Boxes. ..."They showed that a work of art need have no special quality discernible by the senses. Its status as a work of art does not depend on how it looks, or on any physical qualities whatsoever. Arthur C. Danto, concluded from these that anything could be a work of art. He might have drawn the same conclusion from Marcel Duchamp's "fountain" 1917, (a urinal). Danto decided that ordinary objects could be works of art only if they were so in the opinion of the experts and critics who make up the art-world. He adds another criterion - that the artist must have had the intention of creating an artwork i.e. art can't be a child's scribble.

But what about popular culture? Suppose you really like this picture?

And I am feeling particularly highbrow, and suspect that the pleasure you get from this picture is not the same pleasure I get from this picture.

Albrecht Durer

John Carey would say that what I am saying, when I am saying that I think this the more beautiful- "What I feel is more valuable than what you feel." "We can see now that such a claim is nonsense psychologically, because other people's feelings cannot be accessed. But even if they could be, would it be meaningful to assert that your experiences were more valuable than someone else's?"

John Carey argues that there are no rational grounds for thinking there is such a thing as "high art" which is better than "popular art".

Ellen Dissanayake, in her book, "What is art for?" approaches the question by asking what art has contributed to natural selection. She looks at a range of artistic practises from skin-painting to weapon decoration traceable in early human societies. All these early art forms, who observes, were communal, reinforcing the group's cohesion and helping to assure its survival. The divisive tendencies of high art are alien to them.

The behavioural tendency that Dissanayake suggests lies behind them all is "making special". Making  special is not confined to humans- think of the bower bird. "Dissanayake thinks that communities that made things special survived better than those that did not, because the fact of taking pains convinced others as well as themselves that the activity - tool manufacture, say - was worth doing. So art's function was to render socially-important activities gratifying, physically and emotionally, and that is how it played a part in natural selection. "

Primarily, for Dissanayake, we are lonely. Whereas hunter-gatherer man lived from birth to death in a tight-knit group, modern man is born into a diverse, stratified society of strangers, and this is something quite new in the human repertoire. Popular art , not high art, is receptive and accessible and emphasises belonging so restores the cohesion of the hunter-gatherer group. Its pre-occupation with romantic/sexual love is unprecedented in other societies and Dissanayake believes that this is a response to the loneliness of the modern condition.

We seek intense emotions, because the purpose of emotion, in evolutionary terms, is to give focus and direction to our activities. Cognition is freewheeling until emotion (fear, desire, anger) gives it something to home in on. Mass art displays violence and sensationalism. For intellectuals in the  early 20th century these reveal its lowness and proves "the debased nature of its adherents".

Carey discusses art as a form of escapism. He argues that escapism, like violence and sensationalism, seems to be a human necessity.

Dissanayake argues that decoration of the self and the home is in line with high-art practices across times and cultures. Gardening also is a making-special and ranks as an art.

Carey undermines Iris Murdoch's claims to know the difference between good art and bad art. "Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision." she has written somewhere. "OBJECTIVE" is of course completely meaningless as artists' visions are nothing if not subjective.

Here is a passage which comes from the Afterword, where Carey answers his critics, and one of them is most definitely Jeanette Winterson. "Winterson believes that art, like religion, makes you a better person. "Like religion, art offers an alternative value system, it asks us to see differently, think differently, challenging ourselves and the way we live." (she says). "Challenging herself is not something we see Winterson doing, however, nor even allowing herself  a moment of self-doubt. In reality a religion such as Christianity, with its strict ethical code and its insistence on the subjugation of the self, is entirely unlike art, which has no unified ethic, and which often generates not self-abasement but self-esteem, ..." Carey rejoins.

It is as though art enables us to look in a very flattering mirror. When I stand in the gallery watching people, their thoughts about the paintings allow them to stand more erect and in a manner which shows that they feel more self-worth. They feel special, confident.

Anyway, what really convinced me that high art encourages self-admiring delusions are the accounts of Hitler's obsession with ownership of the "sacred" objects, and his theft of such a huge collection of high art,  and J Paul Getty's belief that his art collection made him a significantly superior human being. After this, there were accounts of the wonders that prison drama groups and prison reading groups can do for people's self-worth - these are really worth sponsoring as they can change lives.

Pictures in galleries - they are relaxing to look at and sometimes encourage deep reflection. They exhibit profoundly interesting qualities in artists: their honesty, humility, compassion and courage. Sometimes only one quality, sometimes two or three, rarely all four. Carey makes you think though, that maybe the money spent on art galleries would be better spent on community art projects. 

And then he goes into literature which he values very much as a kind of ongoing argument about ways of seeing life and the self: rational, romantic, or as detached or scornful, but anyway useful as a long, wide range of discourse about the human condition.

My sense of smell has gone

I used to have a keen sense of smell - I could smell gas, burning, scents - I had confidence knowing that I could detect a clean smell from a dangerous or dirty one.

Since last spring I have a very little sense of smell. I can't smell burning, gas or bleach. I can't smell most herbs, or any flower scents, not even strong ones.I really miss the scents of toiletries: shampoo, body lotion, perfume. I used to love that.

I can't smell baking or bread or doughnuts, none of those things. Luckily I can still taste food from my taste buds.

My doctor referred me to a specialist. ENT. But she wanted to put a camera up my nose and into my sinuses and down the back of my throat. I said no. I was terrified by the look of the tube - it hardly looked flexible.I guess there is nothing to be done now. I just have to get used to life as it will be. I have still many sources of pleasure. Sad face.

My daughter told her friends about my sense of smell, and she was surprised to find that a few of them said - "My mother's sense of smell has gone too." I said to her "Do they do their own cleaning?" "Why?" she asked. I told her that the GP had asked me if I used strong chemicals for my work. Well, cleaning uses strong chemicals in that hardly a week goes by when I don't use bleach for something. But I don't use these chemicals all day every day. Frances reported a mixed result. Some friends mums clean, some employ a cleaner. But it is likely that they all use some bleach-based cleaning spray.

I can still smell onions (a chemical smell) celery (very strongly) and garlic (ugh!) and all these smells have lost their scent and only have their chemical underlay. My own smell is strongly of celery.

Recently I thought my sense of smell was coming back. I could smell bleach and coffee. A couple of days later it had gone again.

What happened next

Resemblances - My father and Churchill

Especially when Churchill was a youngish man, he looked like my father. My father also looked like Peter Ustinov, and had the same kind of voice. But the Churchill thing is the strangest - they also had exactly the same handwriting. I saw Churchill's writing in the War Cabinet Rooms and could hardly believe the close resemblance.

Sometimes they dredge up a new old pic of Churchill and I have the odd feeling I am looking at my father - or even my brother. There is the same moody intelligence, an abstracted look. I know him so well I almost am the same person - that's how I felt about my father, sometimes.

My father could make you believe he was an amazing, wonderful man, and he traded on this ability, without actually being in any way amazing or wonderful, but he was competent and intelligent, a professional engineer. It was a pity he wanted so much to be more than that, and messed up in business, losing all his money. That was not his only problem. He also like to charm women and to have their admiration. He liked making them laugh. Women of his own class tended to see through him and find him lacking in substance - and he hated their low opinion, so he always went for women of a lower social strata. He used to say he hated "school marms" (educated middle-class women) and refused to come to Parents' evenings. My mother used to ask me with an imploring face if she had to go? I said she had to. The "school marms" intimidated her and she had no idea what to ask them. I advised her to "ask Jackie's mum what she asks". But really, the other mums mostly gave her that excluded feeling too.

A man not unlike my father 

I read something recently about Churchill's relationship with his brother - he tended to bask in the public gaze himself, and not wish his brother to gain the limelight at all. I suppose as children they were in competition for limited parental attention, and that formed Churchill's personality. It must have been very strange to know that your mother is the King's mistress. All the rejection that Churchill suffered in his childhood later came out as depression. But he had a very brave, buoyant personality.

Like Churchill, my father went to boarding school at the age of 7, and was part of that system. He didn't look back at his schooldays with much affection. You wonder if it was emotionally damaging. The only things it gave him were a sense of superiority and the door to Cambridge University. He used to mention Cambridge a lot - but he said , when my mother criticised him for showing off, that going to Cambridge is something worth showing off about.!!

Misleading critics - Mary Poppins

If I wrote a piece every time a critic was misleading I would be very communicative, But here is a common error - blaming the actor/crediting the actor for something not in their power.

We went to see "Mary Poppins" when we were away in the Quantocks, and had different reactions to it. S. thought it was far too like the original. He spotted that the writers had used the old film as a blueprint and traced slightly different variations on top, which was, in his opinion, uncreative. I liked it a lot. I never liked Julie Andrews voice - she sounded inauthentic, like the product of intensive elocution lessons; and I feared that she had somehow lost her true self in the process. (She looked warm and kind and sympathetic when she dealt with the children, which was a plus.) But I preferred this new overly posh Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) because I felt she had something genuine about her - poise and a genuine confidence around children. And in the song and dance routine she lost her posh voice and sounded cockney, and I'm pretty sure that was what she was like in the books. A cockney with a veneer of put-on genteel. I vaguely remember that she was a real disappointment in the books because she was not Disney sweet, not at all.

This is the comment from the misleading critic (Vulture.com) "Whishaw's bereavement is so pained, it casts a pall over his scenes." This reads as though Ben Whishaw were at fault. He was simply acting the lines that were written, in the manner the director approved. Yes, he was brilliant at making you feel his intense pain, and that's because he is a really good actor! If the screenwriter hadn't written the scenes where he shows grief he wouldn't have done so. Bad marks for the writer - but in this case the writer decided to throw in a bit of creativity in the form of a problem that Mary Poppins cannot solve. Nothing can make poor dead mother come back. Mary P can only advise the family on how to come to terms with their loss. It is a very emotional centre to a pretty spectacle.

The critic says "only Mortimer brings the requisite lightness to her role." Yes, she played Jane Banks, sister of Whishaw's Michael. She wasn't bereaved in the story, and furthermore, she had an eye for a handsome lamplighter, and romance came her way, which generally is a cause for cheerfulness. The script did not require her to grieve.

So, misleading critic, don't blame the actor for the way the film is constructed and written.