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David Lodge, Sunday Times
'Informative, thought-provoking and entertaining.'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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"'An informative, thought-provoking and entertaining book on a subject that rarely produces writing with all three qualities.' David Lodge, Sunday Times 'Engaged, provocative and frequently funny.' Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph 'Incisive and inspirational.' Blake Morrison, Guardian"
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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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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
30 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Writing slickly , Carey scores a few easy points in the first few chapters.
He probably doesn't much like art, at least not visual art or music.
He certainly doesn't have much time for aesthetic pleasure as an end in itself- it isn't "socially useful". Enjoyment, surprise, revelation- these aren't "good". The individual psyche isn't important, what matters are human interractions.
This limited view leads him to praise literature, especialy theatre, for it's value as a means of moral exegisis. This is all very English, and worthy, but reductive. Anyone familiar with Pevsner's much superior "The Englishness of English Art" will agree, and note that it is such attitudes, in part have lead to the certain flat-footedness of British art and building.
He sums up by saying how wonderful it is that Shakespeare can be used to teach convicts and thugs things about the human condition. This to him is the "good of the arts".
Of course, it is a good thing to reduce the likelihood of recidivism among prisoners, but in reducing "good" in art to "moral improvement" Carey simply shows his own limited appreciation of the joys of creativity, and sounds like a New Labour apparachik.
He probably doesn't much like art, at least not visual art or music.
He certainly doesn't have much time for aesthetic pleasure as an end in itself- it isn't "socially useful". Enjoyment, surprise, revelation- these aren't "good". The individual psyche isn't important, what matters are human interractions.
This limited view leads him to praise literature, especialy theatre, for it's value as a means of moral exegisis. This is all very English, and worthy, but reductive. Anyone familiar with Pevsner's much superior "The Englishness of English Art" will agree, and note that it is such attitudes, in part have lead to the certain flat-footedness of British art and building.
He sums up by saying how wonderful it is that Shakespeare can be used to teach convicts and thugs things about the human condition. This to him is the "good of the arts".
Of course, it is a good thing to reduce the likelihood of recidivism among prisoners, but in reducing "good" in art to "moral improvement" Carey simply shows his own limited appreciation of the joys of creativity, and sounds like a New Labour apparachik.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
May not be your cup of tea
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. Read more
Published 8 months ago by RR Waller
Wise and brilliant
Fantastic book for the mildly sceptical lay person who finds themselves occasionally baffled about art and especially professional art criticism. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Michael Turley
Breathtakingly careless and incoherent
In the first place, this book has the wrong title. It should be called 'How Sacred Are The Arts?', because that's the question Carey spends most of his time trying to answer, but... Read more
Published 21 months ago by lexo1941
Democratic for the People
John Carey, the former emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, and the author of superb critical studies of John Donne, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray has... Read more
Published on 2 April 2010 by Roderick Blyth
What Good are the Arts?
This is one of those books that everyone should read, because everyone, one way or another, if affected by `the arts'. Whether it's art lessons at school, GCSE Eng. Read more
Published on 1 April 2010 by M Millais
A Nose Tweak
The funniest book I have read this year. Carey tweaks the nose of the urban elites, and their earnest country cousins at 'arts centre' mission stations, he tweaks it until it... Read more
Published on 11 Feb 2007 by A. P. Hick
A knockabout but no knockout
Carey is funny and incisive, and certainly a critique of the Visual Arts, with its intellectual pretensions and creative stasis is overdue. Read more
Published on 21 Jan 2006 by Dr. G. SPORTON
A Joy to Read From Beginning to End
This book is a sheer joy from start to finish, full of sharp insights, written in sparse, elegant prose - astringent and beautiful and easy to read. Read more
Published on 18 Aug 2005 by Catherine Czerkawska
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