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What Good are the Arts? Paperback – 1 Jun 2006

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John Carey (Author)
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John Carey (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 16 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber; Main edition (1 Jun. 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0571226035
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571226030
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2 x 19.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 162,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"'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"

Book Description

What Good are the Arts? by John Carey is a provocative, entertaining and devastatingly intelligent assessment of the values and problems of art.

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 starsDo you get it?
By Demot on 18 Oct. 2006
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.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsHilarious, but internally contradictory
By A Customer on 17 Aug. 2005
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.
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2.0 out of 5 starsteachy
By Nt Deregowski on 14 Aug. 2008
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.
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1.0 out of 5 starsBreathtakingly careless and incoherent
By lexo1941 on 31 Aug. 2010
Format: Paperback
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 since the problem of over-reverential art criticism has not been a serious thing in the minds of the general public since the decline of the Bloomsbury group, it's not surprising that Carey and his publishers went with something more punchy. Another possible title would be 'How Good Do Other People Think The Arts Are?', because the more you read this book, the more you realise that John Carey is apparently neither willing nor able to grapple with the question himself; instead, he prefers to quote other people's attempts to do so, and passes verdict on them. What emerges from this is not so much what John Carey thinks about the arts: insofar as he's interested in them at all he doesn't really seem to like them much, which is a bit surprising in an Oxford Professor of English Literature, and he knows very little about anything other than literature, and what he knows about that is confined almost entirely to a certain period of English-language literature, maybe the last 150 years or so. This is a fairly narrow specialisation for someone who is trying to make grand sweeping statements about the good of the arts as a whole. But that's okay, maybe he has some hitherto unexpressed talent for brilliant generalisation, a capacity to make large arguments about complex subjects with insight and explanatory power? Except, um, no. He doesn't.

The art critic Matthew Collings, who was one of this book's very few negative reviewers, characterised it cruelly but amusingly as 'taxi driver bollocks'.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsFour Stars

A v good read.

Published 13 months ago by splodger
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Very intelligent, lucid and witty.

Published 20 months ago by Petra
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent read, in good condition with no annotations.

Published on 10 Nov. 2014 by Paul Anthony
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

very interesting

Published on 18 Sept. 2014 by hans sandkvist
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Very happy. Thank you.

Published on 6 Sept. 2014 by dolma
4.0 out of 5 starsWhat Good Are The Arts?

The author's definition of Art: It is Art if it's creator says that it's Art. Simple and elegant.
Highly recommended.

Published on 10 May 2014 by Brian Fairclough
5.0 out of 5 starsMay 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 on 9 Sept. 2011 by RR Waller
5.0 out of 5 starsWise 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 on 5 Feb. 2011 by Michael Turley
5.0 out of 5 starsWhat 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
5.0 out of 5 starsA 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

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