John Carey: What Good are the Arts?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1622219,,00.html


Here is about half of the article:


The mother of literary rows is about to erupt over a little book that asks innocently: "What is art?" It's a loaded question that touches a nerve in anyone who has spluttered over the modern art excesses of Turner prize shortlists or sneered at Rolf Harris's televised art lessons for plebs. Its authorship by John Carey promises a gratifying explosion.
Carey has made it his business to puncture the pretensions of the cultural elite and defend the common man from his twin pulpits as a distinguished Oxford textual scholar and chief literary critic of The Sunday Times. Outrage greeted his last attack on James Joyce, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This time he has gone further with a scathing work, What Good Are The Arts? which seems calculated to incense snobs and lesser mortals alike.



The controversial reputation of the 71-year-old emeritus professor of English Literature seems at odds with the polite and rather shy figure who keeps bees and grows vegetables at his cottage in the north Oxfordshire village of Lyneham. But then Carey, a grammar school boy, is the eternal outsider who once wrote Down With Dons and derided the Brideshead Revisited aspects of the university whose rarefied air he has breathed for 44 years.

His new book, to be published next week, kicks off by demolishing the "sacred" aura that surrounds art objects and which, he says, makes hurtful assumptions about "superior and inferior" refinements that reflect on those who do or don't appreciate them. Hence his deadly question: what is art? His answer, in essence, is that nearly everything written about the value of art is nonsense. "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, although it may be a work of art only for that one person," he concludes.

For good measure, he sides with the ignoramus's parodied view: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." True to this adage, in the second part of the book he makes out a self-confessedly personal case for the superiority of literature over all other arts. Along the way Carey directs a withering fire at a number of celebrated cultural figures. He takes the novelist Jeanette Winterson to task for equating art with "rapture" and her distinction between "true" artists, such as Eliot and Woolf, and non-artists like Joseph Conrad.

"Her belief she is surrounded by magical presences strikes the ordinary observer as barely sane," he writes. Advocates of high art like Winterson "think of themselves as leading rich and happy lives, and are sure that if the benighted masses would only share their artistic tastes they would be rich and happy too".

He declares the late Iris Murdoch to be "spectacularly wrong" for having claimed that good art presents a truthful vision of the human condition because it is objective. "The argument collapses the moment you give it the slightest prod," Carey writes. Chris Smith, the former secretary for culture, media and sport, is accused of a "banal and evasive piece of claptrap" that attempted to deny the superiority of high art but showed he adhered to the idea.

One of his most sardonic passages is reserved for John Tusa, managing director of the Barbican Centre, for claiming that opera is "demanding" and "difficult". Carey asks: "What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing? Getting served at the bar in the interval often requires some effort, it is true, but even that could hardly qualify as difficult compared with most people's day's work."

It's Carey's wildest ride yet on his hobbyhorse of attacking snobbery in all its forms in the spirit of his heroes George Orwell and Arnold Bennett. His 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses expressed contempt for literary modernists such as Woolf who cultivated obscurity as a frightened reaction to the advent of mass culture at the turn of the 20th century.

A dedicated walker and sometime ice dancer, Carey has written books on John Milton, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and John Donne. With a prodigious appetite for devouring books, he has served twice on the Booker prize jury and is chairman of the Man Booker international prize, which will be announced on June 27.

In his 28 years of reviewing for The Sunday Times, Carey has been at pains to be accessible to the general reader with a lucid prose style and regular invocations of common human experience.

His rigour and outspokenness are said to be feared by other critics. "He provokes a lot of envy," says Peter Kemp, our fiction editor.

"There's often more in one of his reviews than in a scholastic book. He combines dazzling scholarship and witty colour in an extraordinary range."

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Then consider this by Julie Burchill: "In a perfect world, intellectuals would be original, logical, funny and full of common sense. That is, they would be like Professor John Carey." Or Craig Raine, reviewing Carey's book on Dickens: "Few critics, except perhaps the early acid Eliot, have his command for language or his eye for what is bad in an author."

Carey has his critics, who claim he takes inverted snobbery to excess. "Every item in this ragbag of parasitic hackery is larded with one or more of the hallmarks of donhood its exposition pretends to deplore," one dissenter expostulated (anonymously) of Carey's essay Down With Dons.