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.