I shared a panel with John Carey on Wednesday night, tied to his excellent new book What Good Are the Arts? His presentation was well-organised, and helped the rest of us to grapple with one of the most slippery topics in public
Carey outlined five standard questions we ask about the 'good' that the arts provide. My own private objections and affirmations of each point are in italics afterwards.
1) The arts make us better Art education teaches us about art, but not much else. Carey cited Kreitler's Psychology and Art to say that behaviour is not significantly created and modified through art.
Hugely contentious point. For comparison, see Manuel Castells' point in the Internet Galaxy - for him, art becomes one of the few places we can establish fellow feeling and experience, in a world of every more niche experiences.
2) Why do the arts matter to us? Carey cites various studies showing that the arts' primary importance in society might be as a confirmer of social status: Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of 'taste' and 'distinction' among the French bourgeioisie, showing that a mastery and appreciation of art is a way to shape your life (and distinguish your class from other, through the accumulation of 'cultural capital'). Another source, David Lewis Williams' The Mind in the Cave, even suggests that art appreciation was the key factor in the supremacy of homo sapiens over neanderthal man - the former much richer in powers of symbolic thought, the latter often reduced to pathetic copying.
Bourdieu's studies make a welcome appearance in Carey's argument - not often given much shrift in English literary circles. Yet the ability to surf and choose between quite distinct tranches of cultural capital is not much acknowledged by Carey. What's to stop you, through your TIVO or Sky Plus, from composing your free day's viewing from a combination of (say) BBCs 4, 3, 2 and 1? From Beethoven celebrations to Eastenders? The status of arts as a''positional" good is surely made trickier in an media environment with many more cultural options.
3) The arts give us pleasure Are they like religious feelings of ecstasy? Carey quotes a survey which asked respondents whether they had ever experienced transcendant ecstasy - what triggered the experience? The answers included skiing, sex, natural scenery, childbirth, mathematical puzzles... Art was among them, but not the majority experience.
Is ecstasy even good in itself? Yes, if it's divine revelation - not so much if it's self-gratification. Carey cites the book from literary editor Bill Buford, Among the Thugs, an account of Buford joining a crew of Man Utd. football thugs - which he loved! He describes the feeling of giving someone a kicking, "the softness of this kid as my boot thudded into him", etc, as inducing a feeling of "transcendent, ecstatic joy".
Carey is right here - ecstasy (as the name of the popular drug makes clear) is a experience of an expanded, intensified or vacated consciousness ('largin' it' or 'out of my head', as dance culture would put it) which absolutely escapes the claims of art. What was interesting about the idealism of the early dance revolution of the 90s, however, was the relationship between musical and pharmacological ecstasy - the collective sonic repetition of the former (initally not about 'star' performers), locking into the anxiety-dissolving, identity-melting properties of the latter. Buford's ecstasy of violence experienced with his soccer crew, in other words, isn't the only kind of transcendent experience available in pop culture. Carey might like to look at the enduring nature of carnival celebration - a tradition of 'play' that stretches well before what we recognise as art.
4) The arts are a sign of civilisation Recall tv shows like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation - so sure and clear about this. Yet there are also critics like Peter Burger who say that art is a monument to social injustice. All depends on our definition of civilized... Is civilisation about subsiding a symphony orchestra? Or about the actual distribution of resources in the world? With 3 billion people living on $2 a day, no amount of art could make that seem 'civilised'. Carey tells the story of John Paul Getty, the great sponsor of art and galleries - a seeming supporter of civilisation. Yet his attitudes towards the poor is brutal - they should be dumped in outlying areas, and left to fend for themselves: for all his Rubens collection, his opinions are no more civilised than a saloon bar fascist.
And speaking of fascism... The book that conclusively demonstrates shows how art does not generate civility is Frederick Spots' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Remember Hitler's great ambition for Linz - to create the greatest art gallery in history.
I'm strongly with Carey on this. The pretence of 'radical' art as it cowers in corporately-sponsored gallery spaces is equally noisome. If artists don't engage with this asymmetrical, transformative world, in which mobile phones coordinate terrorists attacks, or bioscientists literally''play god" with the genome (though some are doing this, to their cost - see Steve Kurtz) - that is, if they don't engage with the sheer interactivity and potential for tipping-polnt change all around us - then are they involved in anything more than a leisure activity for the affluent classes?
5) Artistic judgement is just a matter of personal taste This is Carey's preferred answer to the question 'what good are the arts?' One view has always been that good art is what God likes. Ruskin called it 'the taste of angels', George Steiner also talked of the 'ice and fire of the divine'. It has the virtue of at least asserting absolute standards, and the vice of no-one having access to criteria for those standards. Neuroscience can say that the brain assesses figurative or abstract art in particular ways - but can it tell us about value, or can it just illuminate when we clearly apprehend an object? Even neuroscience stops short at the possibility of accessing the very nature of our internal experience - which we can barely express in words. We also can't say that my quality of experience of art is higher than yours - I can't access your mind, so how would I know? The good of art lies in our individual apprehension of what makes good art. This is the only tenable position at the end of our survey of aesthetic theories.
Again, I'm reminded in this about the distinctions that many scholars have drawn between art and play - art as intensive exploration, play as extensive exploration; art as about mastery of symbolic systems, play as about mastery of self and world. Carey ties the good of art to what could be called psychological sovereignty - only I have full access to my own subjective feelings about any phenomena - but it strikes me that play is the more elemental assertion of that sovereignty. I'm therefore interested in those 'plays of art' (as opposed to works of art) that are around us these days - those digital simulations and games, either in console boxes or across networks, that encourage interaction with artistic creation, rather than passive reception of it.
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