Showing posts with label John Carey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Carey. Show all posts

13/03/2014

What Good Are The Arts?


In late November 2006, I had read with immense interest John Carey’s book What Good Are The Arts? This intensively researched, study of the arts, had provoked me to a more in depth study of arts meaning than anything I had read in a long time. Its polemic against the pseudo-religious, elitist, and commercial vanities of art in western culture, was long overdue and well made. Even if in trying to make these arguments Carey resorted not only to quoting the most extreme examples of conceptual art (Duchamp’s urinal, Manzoni’s supposed cans of shit, Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and Emin’s Bed) but also the tastes and policies of Hitler to make his point.                                                                         

Over all I found Carey’s book the most nihilistic study of art I had ever read. His prose was exemplary – accessible, cogent, well argued and hard to refute. But there was also a complete lack of love expressed for any paintings, drawings, sculptures, symphonies, movies or television programs of any period what so ever. Instead, the second half of the book was an argument for literature as an art form. Carey claimed that only literature could criticize itself and contain arguments against it. Well this should not have been so surprising given that Carey was professor of literature. But in fact many artists I knew had made work which criticized the nature of art not least many of the conceptual artists he decried.        
                                                                                                         
  
By tearing down arts; religious, High-Art, moral, therapeutic and critical delusions, Carey brought art down to the level of personal subjective taste, declaring that art was: ‘anything that anyone had ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.’ At the turn of the millennium’s godless, multi-cultural, consumerist, materialistic and politically relativistic world this may have been a logical conclusion. But it made criticism unworkable and indeed true appreciation impossible. Carey's argument was empty, meaningless, tautological and solipsistic. Art I felt did not exist in a vacuum - just as no man was an island. Art like personal life was intermeshed in human society – and it could only be understood as part of that society. Art I felt reflected the concerns of different aspects of society and of that society in its various manifestations. Art was part of the webs of meaning that made up humanity. Separating art from those webs, only led in my experience to the madhouse. By suggesting that art was “anything that anyone had ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person art”, Carey condemned appreciation of art to the solipsistic and subjective whims of the individual.                  


But art, I had come to realize was not about individuals – it was about communities of taste. Every artist was part of society and their work was important only in terms of the effects it had on its audience. Geniuses like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso or Duchamp, were only geniuses in respect that they fulfilled the expectations of their society. Even artists like van Gogh and other outsider artists like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, who were ignored and marginalized in their lifetime were only important because history had proved their work to be prophetic and relevant to subsequent generations. Outside of the matrix of the art world, I knew there were millions of artists producing ‘art’, but to be true art, their art had to be recognized by those on the inside. This may have been cruel, this may have been arbitrary, this may have been elitist, this may have been unjust – but no more so than poverty or social injustice was in general. Art I felt was not merely about consumerism, it was about dialogue, argument and agreements of taste. As a result, what was surprising was not so much the range of disagreements on art, but the degree of agreement on what was great art.                      



Time and time again, in art history, members of the art elite as well as members of the public had come to agreement on the value of certain artists and certain movements in art. But even if that were not the case, it would still not matter. The fact was that time and time again certain tribes, groups or elites had championed certain artists or artistic styles in the face of the majority opinion, and had won for themselves and their art a place of respect and recognition. As such art, like religion, politics, and philosophy I had come to believe was part of the social dialogue that gave society and humanity its sense of meaning. The meanings may have been particular, but they were the best man could hope for.