What Good Are the Arts?

Has Mr. Carey ever tried to make a work of art? His approach resembles that of a space alien, reporting about human food for those on his home planet. What is this stuff the humans call food? Given its multiple shapes, temperatures, forms, sources and uses, how can it be given a single, static definition? Is there a difference between cuisine, food and mere nutrients? Are the sensory experiences of the millions eaters so varied and ineffable that they can never really be known? The humans build virtual temples for the experiencing of food - indeed, every residence, however humble, has such a shrine. Its like a religion with them. High priests of food practice haute cuisine. But how can these humans say that the fast food diner's experience is less fulfilling than that of someone dining at the Ritz? You basically have the whole book now. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed it. This despite (or, alas, perhaps because of) the fact that it would be reduced to a mere pamphlet if you excised all of its snide snoberries and very unsubtle put-downs. The parrallels continue. As with food, people will sometimes pretend to like what they don't, because it is socially expedient. And people will also deny or conceal their true tastes when these are not socially acceptable. Some eat what others would call garbage. The food of other cultures may fail to attract our appetites. And we all know that people will sometimes pay crazy prices for food, and this is generally done for other reasons than pure connoiseurship. Of course, A book entitled "What Good is Food?" would be ridiculous. Like food, art can be repressed, supressed, outlawed, ridiculed or even badly produced. If people are hungry enough, they'll still find it and eat it. Art is the food of the soul which we don't belive in anymore, but which we feed nonetheless. Mr. Carey stands at two removes from the feast, a critic of critics. One suspects he must be hungry.

What a lively and stimulating book this is! Carey addresses the questions head on, without any clichés about Beauty or Improvement of the Mind. His reflections on the various art forms are original and thought-provoking. He observes, for example, that if you have an image of a painting or a piece of music in your mind, it still is more satisfying to see or hear the original; but if you've memorized a poem, you "have" the poem; reading the original does not add anything to the experience. There's something interesting on every page of this book, and it's all deftly and wittily argued. A monumental contribution to the debate.

A fascinating book, I found remarkable insights that spurred my thinking, or brought me back to a line of thought that I had been working on years ago, half forgotten. A book that is balanced, fair, subjective in its attitude, and a product of careful self examination within our world of experience. I highly recommend it to people of all ages and interests.

This little book has caused a bit of a stir in England. It's easy to see why. Carey mercilessly skewers the facile pieties of the art world and it's a good thing, too. Despite the title of the book, he doesn't offer any real answers to his question, except perhaps in the case of art programs in prisons. This fact doesn't bother me. What's important is that we get to the place where it is acceptable for people to ask the question at all. Unfortunately, too often the importance of the arts is taken for granted, all the better for the people who have no patience or skill in dealing with impertinent dimwits who even have to or dare to ask. The arts have their own version of the question, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it." If you have to ask what are the arts good for, well, you're just not the kind of person who will ever get it so we don't have to give you an answer. Unfortunately, the kinds of things art might actually be good for are probably not the kinds of things the arts community would want it to be good for. If art is just something that can make people feel good about themselves, it's difficult to see how it performs a function different from any number of other things that people do to feel useful and fulfilled. Carey demonstrates, as George Steiner has elsewhere, that art does not make us better people, or not necessarily so. It certainly doesn't make art producers better people, as an acquaintance with the biographies of many artists will show you unless you imagines that without art they would have been even worse. Put simply, one is left with the impression that art is either entertainment or something that can't be explained in sensible terms but which dwells on some higher plane beyond the petty demands of human comprehension. When Carey gets around to making the case for literature the book becomes, in my opinion, slightly less interesting. It's remains a five-star book overall but I found the case for literature less compelling. If he wanted to present literature as good for something in itself then he seems to contradict the argument in the first section of the book. If he was simply comparing it to other art forms then I think he has more of a case. Literature works because it uses language, the tool we use to make intelligible arguments and understand the world. Literature can comment on itself and be understood to do so in ways that music and visual art cannot. Music and the visual arts, however enjoyable they may be, do not work the same way as language. When we try to understand and explain music and the visual arts we always do so in linguistic terms, as Carey points out. Literature works in the same medium as thought. No one discusses music by humming or art by drawing, but we can talk about literature in exactly the same way we read and write it. Less is lost in translation. This book should be widely read whether one ends up loving it or hating it, and I suspect opinion will be so