The Oldest Argument

 

I’m currently reading John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts?, a book designed to provoke all art-lovers into a steaming maelstrom of outrage. Carey’s intention is to debunk all the good old myths about art making you feel spiritually uplifted, or turning you into a better person, or actually having much valid purpose at all. You have to bear in mind that this man is a very distinguished literary scholar from Oxford, and these kind of positions can send you either way. At heart, Carey’s aim is an honourable one: he wants to trounce all those pretentious art critics who pour scorn on the ‘lesser’ forms of art, or who have self-aggrandizing intentions attached to their aesthetic appreciation. However, Carey’s method for doing this is to pour scorn on just about any artistic theory, practice or perspective that he can lay his hands on. Attacking other people’s arguments is always, for me, the lowest form of criticism. Believe me, it’s always possible, and pretty easy to do once you’ve got your eye in. I like to see critics constructing positions and creating thought out of their investigations, but that’s a personal thing. In Carey’s favour, he’s very funny, very astute, incredibly well-read, and a real master of elegant English.

 

So let’s have a look at a classic Carey moment, when he’s tackling one of the oldest arguments surrounding art, and that’s whether or not we can honestly, and usefully, mark a clear distinction between the class-laden categories of high art and low art. You’ll perhaps not be surprised to know that Carey’s take on this is that we can’t, and his argument pokes fun at all the frankly ridiculous claims people have made across the ages for the value and the importance of ‘high’ art. Here he is at play, getting his teeth into the unfortunate critic, John Tusa, who has foolishly proposed a belief in ‘absolute quality’ in the high arts which he equates with their ‘difficulty’:

 

‘”The fact is,” Tusa explains, “that opera is not like dipping into a box of chocolates. It is demanding, difficult.” Despite this assurance, the association of opera with difficulty seems questionable. What sort of difficulty, it might be asked, do those attending opera encounter? 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 work. The well-fed, well-swaddled beneficiaries of corporate entertainment leaving Covent Garden after a performance and hailing their chauffeurs do not look as if they have been subjected to arduous exercise, mental or physical…. The colossal injections of other people’s money needed to maintain [The Royal Opera House] are notorious. In 1996 alone it swallowed £78 million of lottery funding… As Tusa says, opera is not like dipping into a box of chocolates. It is very much more expensive.’

 

Ok, so we can see where Carey’s going with this, even though he doesn’t state it directly. The argument about difficulty is in fact never really addressed, in favour of attacking opera for the remnants of the old class system that still cling to it, and for its drain on public resources. Television and film, for instance, swallow up more than that amount of money in the UK, but they (more or less) have the grace to support themselves commercially. Carey does go on to talk about ‘difficulty’ taking the crossword puzzle as his preferred example of a practice that would warrant the adjective, but this is equally handled with the same dismissive air. What high art calls ‘difficult’ is what most sane people would call ‘unintelligible’ Carey claims. So whilst I admire Carey for his bite and verve, I think he undermines his own arguments by the sheer vitriol he injects into them.

 

Carey will ultimately dismiss the distinction between high and low art as impossible to maintain, but I think we can do something better than that with it. First of all we have to stop seeing the categories of high and low as being mutually exclusive. Quite a lot of operas, for instance, will include elements of farce, or romance, or pantomime, just as a television cartoon ostensibly for children, like The Simpsons, is a fantastic example of relentlessly subversive, parodic, allusive elements disguised under a sugary outer coating. So it’s incredibly rare, in my opinion, to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. What we get is far more complex and mixed up than that. The way I would distinguish between those high and low elements, is to see ‘low’ or commercial or mass media art as being formulated in order to satisfy the desires and expectations of its audience. Take Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance books, for instance. Every one published is subject to a rigourous assessment by a team of readers who will fill in a detailed questionnaire as to the plot, characters, conclusion, sexual content and so on, of the story, and say whether or not it corresponded to what they liked to read in a book. The data from these assessments is then turned into strict guidelines for the in-house authors, who must follow them to the letter. The whole point of these books is that they comfort and reassure readers by providing them with exactly what they want. By comparison, we might define those ‘high’ elements of art as the ones that challenge or question our expectations, whether they be about the world we live in, or the way that an artwork ‘ought’ to be put together. Well, I don’t know what you think, but this kind of works for me.

 

There’s another point I’d like to make, though, about this so-called battle between high and low art. To hear Carey talk, you’d think that the world was split into a toffee-nosed elite of high art lovers who spent their days venting their spleen and pouring their disdain onto the gentle masses, who ask for nothing more than to humbly enjoy the crumbs of art thrown down to them. This kind of judgement of art – the kind designed to make the judge feel superior over others – is by no means confined to the world of supposed ‘high’ art connoisseurs. I am quite convinced that no opera buff would ever be as rude to a Barry Manilow fan as, say, a fervent supporter of The Prodigy. Soap opera fans across the world might hail Dallas as a king amongst television dramas whilst dismissing Dynasty as pointless tripe. What I’m trying to say is that there is no one who doesn’t prefer one type of art to another, or dislike one form more than another, without attaching some form of value judgement to that preference. And what’s more, attaching value to art, privileging one kind over another, celebrating the qualities of pop or Pre-Raphaelite painting, or arthouse cinema or crime fiction because those genres or schools are simply better than others, is one of the great pleasures bound up in enjoying and responding to art. Ok, it shouldn’t be used as a tool of subjugation, but come on, let’s face it, we’re talking about art here. Liking Barry Manilow was never the reason anyone was sent to the gas chambers. But what we do need to acknowledge, is that intellect will never govern artistic appreciation because (as I think Carey’s own arguments clearly show), our response to it is every bit as much about emotion, as it is about reason.