- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (2 Jun 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571226027
- ISBN-13: 978-0571226023
- Product Dimensions: 18.8 x 12.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 293,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
David Lodge, Sunday Times
'Informative, thought-provoking and entertaining.'
Rupert Christiansen, Spectator
'Carey lays into the snobs... Exhilarating and suggestive.'
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First Sentence
'What is a work of art?' is a simple question, but no one has yet found an answer to it, and perhaps finding a single answer that will satisfy everyone is impossible. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
'What is a work of art?' is a simple question, but no one has yet found an answer to it, and perhaps finding a single answer that will satisfy everyone is impossible. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Do you get it?,
By Demot "Demot" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: What Good are the Arts? (Paperback)
This book is not quite what you might think from the cover. It suggests it may be an enquiry into The Arts, but in fact it is a 100 page discussion of literary fiction, prefaced by 170 pages saying how painting and music are nothing much.
There are many good reviews of this book available online, and different reviewers have found different reasons for becoming frustrated with the book. For me it was the outrageous sophistry of his arguments. He seems to use every fallacy available, attacking the person not the idea, making sweeping generalisations, setting up caricatures of opponents and knocking them down with torrents of scorn. I found it useful to read it alongside Anthony Weston's great little book `A Rulebook for Arguments,' using Carey as a textbook of what-not-to-do. His rabble-rousing style is very readable, but becomes annoying each time you realize you have just read a lot of nonsense. I wondered if he intended the whole book to be ironic - picking up interesting ideas and blowing them down with such silly arguments that you are inspired to work out what is really true. Carey has been described as a 'reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism' (LRB) - but is that really what he is doing in this book? While the bulk of the book is about the visual arts, it seems he just doesn't `get' it. Not just overheated aestheticism; he really does not understand the value of the arts as arts. He thinks - or pretends to think - that the arts are inane, at best an enjoyable entertainment, at worst mere snobbery. Carey writes that he wants to burst the pomposity of elitist art-worshipers, but he never knows where to stick the pin, having no idea that there is real value to be distinguished from the fake. Some of his comments on painting are laughable. Is this just a pose? After all, he has spent his life in the arts - as professor and critic. At the start of the second section, he gets into his real point - `Literature is superior to the other arts.' His defence of literature is that it is `not just to delight like painting or music,' which misses the whole point of difficulty in the arts. Do people go to modern art for `delight'? But on closer inspection it turns out that he thinks literary fiction is superior only in so far as it is a sort of philosophy, not an art at all. He writes: `only literature can criticize, then. Further, only literature can moralize. Nowadays this is frowned on. Literature, we are advised, should show not tell. It should work obliquely, through narrative. This is rather like saying that Christ would have done better to stick to parables.' Actually, it is rather like saying that the arts work with the imagination. If you never understood why some people think the arts can provide powerful experiences of great importance to your life, then you can enjoy the confirmation of a professor who doesn't `get' it either. He will tell you there is nothing to get. If you want a serious consideration of the place of the arts in modern life, or if you are easily annoyed, don't buy this book. That said, having thrown it across the room in frustration, I always picked it up again after a week or two. It isn't dull.
29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hilarious, but internally contradictory,
By A Customer
This review is from: What Good are the Arts? (Hardcover)
It's hard not to love John Carey. There are so few witty, intelligent literary critics willing to stand up for the general reader. As ever, this offering is rich in pointed and thoughtful deflations of the smug, the pompous and the self-important, and the result is rib-tickling and heartwarming. However, it isn't always illuminating, because Carey's critical judgement is sometimes overwhelmed by his flair for apt phrases and putdowns, and because of the stark contradiction at the heart of the book. Having spent several chapters wittily dissecting the pretensions of high culture in the form of the visual and musical arts, he abruptly tells us that literature is different because it alone is self-critical. Huh? Modern art - since Matisse, at least - is vehemently self critical to the point of being self-consuming, constantly lampooning its own status. There's an intriguing argument about literary language actually being vague and suggestive rather than precise, but one could use this just as well to defend Vaughan Williams or Kandinsky. Somehow, Carey wants to cut Dickens a lot more slack than anyone else, despite the fact that he too could be as snobbish as anybody. If you can live with all these contradicitons, however, you can enjoy Carey's own lacerating wit as itself the kind of literary pleasure he wants to defend.
5.0 out of 5 stars
May not be your cup of tea,
By
This review is from: What Good are the Arts? (Paperback)
John Carey, a very well-know and respected critic and writer who, under that title, seems to be sitting on a branch and sawing between him and the trunk. It is a question so many people ask with all seriousness and Carey sets out to answer them.
What is a work of art? Is "high art" superior? Can science help? Do the arts make us better? He admits the "inevitably subjective" nature of art criticism; on page 173, he states ""I shall try to show why literature is superior to the other arts and can do things they cannot do". His definition of literature "is writing I want to remember - not for its content alone as one might want to remember a computer manual, but for itself; those particular words in that particular order." (Pp174-175) This sounds more than a little like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "best words in the best order", his definition of poetry. (Does Carey actually think people read computer manuals, never mind remember them? Anyone who has read instructions of any kind knows there is a best words and best order for some of them too, resulting in clarity.) Pages 173-175 are a little like "light blue touch paper and stand back" while a literary critic proves his job is best but it is fun, well written, thought-provoking but may end a damp squib. In the end, some will say, like Lawrence in "Last Lesson of the Afternoon": What does it matter to me, if they can write A description of a dog, or if they can't? What is the point? To us both, it is all my aunt! (And yet I'm supposed to care, with all my might.) Enjoyable but don't expect deep philosophy or definitive answers.
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