John Carey - What Good are the Arts?

People in the West have been saying extravagant things about the arts for two and a half centuries. The arts, it is claimed, are sacred, they unite us with the Supreme Being, they are the visible appearance of Gods kingdom on earth, they breathe spiritual dispositions into us, they inspire love in the highest part of the soul, they have a higher reality and more veritable existence than ordinary life, they express the eternal and infinite , and they reveal the innermost nature of the world. This random clutch of tributes reflects the views of authorities ranging chronologically from the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel to the contemporary American critic Geoffrey Hartman, and they could be multiplied ad infinitum.

Even those who would hesitate to classify the arts as holy often feel that they form a kind of sanctified enclave from which certain contaminating influences should be excluded notably money and sex. The Australian critic Robert Hughes voices a general disquiet when he says that the idea of a Van Gogh landscape , the anguished testament of an artist maddened by inequality and social injustice, hanging in a millionaires drawing room, is difficult to contemplate without nausea. For many, the pleasure of walking round a great public art collection is enhanced by the thought that they are in a space where the laws of economics seem to be magically suspended, since the treasures on display are beyond the dreams of private avarice.

That true art should banish thoughts of sexual arousal, as well as of commerce, has been a rule ever since our ideas about art started to be formulated in the 18th century. Currently the Internet is most commonly used as a supplier of pornographic images, which must mean that they are the most sought-after art objects in our world. However, we strictly exclude them from the category of true art, and, in the case of child pornography , criminalize them. We have revived the practice of sending people to prison for looking at the wrong kind of pictures, which had fallen into abeyance since the iconoclastic frenzies of the Protestant reformation, when you could be imprisoned, or even done to death, for possessing pictures of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The arts have traditionally excluded certain kinds of people as well as certain kinds of experience. Writers on the arts have emphasized that their spiritual benefits, though highly desirable , are not available to everyone. The most excellent works of every art, the most noble productions of genius, Schopenhauer admonishes, must always remain sealed books to the dull majority of men, inaccessible to them, separated from them by a wide gulf, just as the society of princes is inaccessible to the common people. For some art-enthusiasts, indeed, it is this very exclusiveness that makes the arts attractive. Equality is slavery, writes the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, That is why I love art. A common 20th-century lament was that universal education had produced a semi-literate horde, insensible to the values of genuine culture, as the avant-garde American art-critic Clement Greenberg put it, whose vulgar clamour for the degraded kinds of art they could appreciate polluted the aesthetic atmosphere.

Quite what sort of spiritual influence genuine art should impart when operating correctly on the correct sort of person remains, however, largely unexamined. It is often said, by art-lovers , that art-lovers have more refined sensibilities than others . But this is a difficult thing to measure. Whereas there are tests for assessing intelligence, no objective computation of refinement is available, and partly for that reason claims and counter-claims in this area arouse passionate indignation. In his book The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias tells of an 11th-century Doge of Venice who married a Greek princess. In her Byzantine circle table-forks were customary, but they had never been heard of in Venice. When the new Dogaressa was seen lifting food to her mouth by means of an instrument with two golden prongs, it gave fearful offence. Her excessive refinement was considered insulting to the Venetians, who ate with their fingers as nature intended, and she was rebuked by ecclesiastics who called down divine wrath upon her. Shortly after, she was afflicted with a repulsive illness, which the Italian theologian St Bonaventure (later nominated as one of the great doctors of the Christian church by Pope Sixtus V) did not hesitate to pronounce a judgement of God.

In our own culture the sacred aura that surrounds art objects makes imputations about superior or inferior artistic refinement particularly hurtful and disconcerting. The situation has been aggravated by the eclipse of painting in the 1960s and its replacement by various kinds of conceptual art, performance art, body art, installations, happenings, videos and computer programmes. These arouse fury in many because they seem, like the Dogaressas table-fork, to be deliberate insults to people of conventional taste (as, indeed, they often are). By implication such artworks categorize those who fail to appreciate them as a lesser kind of human being, lacking the special faculties that art requires and fosters in its adherents. In retaliation, those who dislike the new art forms denounce them as not just inauthentic but dishonest, false claimants seeking to enter the sacred portals of true art.