"What Good Are The Arts?" , John Carey

The Guardian published this article just before the book " What Good Are The Arts" by John Carey was published.

David Hare
Playwright

Art seems inexhaustible. It demands and repays more and more attention. It deepens at every contact. It glows at a different angle according to when and where it's experienced. And you look at the world differently afterwards. That's how it's defined. By this standard, Nina Simone is a great artist. So is Mabel Mercer. And so is Patrick Caulfield. Une Partie de Campagne is a perfect film, less than 40 minutes long. Adam Curtis's television series The Power of Nightmares is already a hugely influential work of art. It's art although it's not fiction. You can't move your mind into the area of its concerns without finding it there, waiting.

When Auden said Raymond Chandler's work should be seen as literature, then plainly he was right. But now when some show-off claims that Meet the Fockers is a better film than Mouchette, they're just being silly. Our culture reflects our politics and our ideology. Good critics like Kenneth Tynan, Raymond Williams and Pauline Kael often had terrible taste, but they had great ideas. They thought ideas more important than taste. They sought to connect a work of art to human experience outside art.

Last week I heard Ravel's Piano Concerto for the first time in my life. Now all I want is to hear it again. Will it make me a better person? Oh, imperceptibly.

Hari Kunzru
Novelist

After the performances of Bach in Birkenau it's hard to argue that the arts are automatically humanising. We know it's simultaneously possible to be a sadistic murderer and art-lover. The point is that the arts 'can' make us better people, not that they manage it every time. Art offers tools for living - to console or delight or enrage or challenge or revitalise dulled perception. Art, above all, is a collaboration between artist and audience. It demands work to create meaning, or even to extract pleasure. To me the Nazi commandant crying at the Cello Suites while sending other human beings to the gas chamber is both terrifying and intriguing. Is he just a snob, a more extreme version of the kind of person who buys opera tickets to confirm his sense of himself as a superior person? Or does he have a genuine sense of beauty? Or both? It seems to me that the answer lies in the idea of 'high art', which I hate. To me 'high art' is just art + power: art that is for whatever reason associated with social privilege, or which is valued by a dominant class or group. Your appreciation of Bach confirms you as a member of the master race. The others are lesser, in part because they don't appreciate Bach. So you can kill them.

There is only good and bad art, and I agree with Carey that the difference lies in the response of the receiver. If I just hear a sawing noise, to me the Cello Suites are not art. If I cry and kill Jews, they are 'high art'. If I cry and feel some kind of connection with the rest of humanity, perhaps based on my wonder that it is possible to order sound in such a way as to produce this profound response in me, then I have experienced art - and am capable, maybe, of being an artist. Listen to Yo-Yo Ma playing the Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites and consider these things. I don't have a 'favourite work of art' in the 'My Funny Valentine' sense, but that will do very well as a starting point.

Jeanette Winterson
Novelist

There is no high art and low art. There is only the real thing and not the real thing. The real thing comes in all kinds of packages and dosed at different strengths. If by low art he [John Carey] means popular culture or entertainment, then it is better to be more precise in his use of language. I am all for the Kylie Showgirl tour and Shrek 2. But I know they are not in the same universe as Don Paterson or Ali Smith. Art makes us better because it offers an alternative value system. Even the making of it is an affront to capitalism; you can't ship it to Hong Kong to get it done cheaper. You can't put it on growth hormones or make it under lab conditions. You can't give it a deadline, cost it, predict it or bank on it. But if you believe that life has an inside as well as outside, then art is what you need. Art works on the inside against the 24/7 emergency zone we call real life.

I am always finding new things to love. The adventure of art is in the new. The consolation of art is everything you have seen, read, heard and kept inside you as a talisman against the popular lie that nothing matters any more.

Kwame Kwai-Armah
Actor and playwright

Civilisations are judged and remembered not by their most successful businessmen but by the art they leave behind. The arts make us better people because they are a mirror, and it's only when you look deep inside yourself and see what makes you tick that you can repair and change. Art is one of the greatest catalysts for debate, and debate is the greatest catalyst of change. A great book, film, piece of theatre or work of art - they all have the capacity to move the human spirit. Personally, I'm a bit of a Rothko man. I often go and look at his work because he makes me think about how life is not just black and white, but all the shades in between.

Saffron Burrows
Actress

Elizabeth Bowen said: 'Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.' The imagination needs art in order to process pain, dispossession and desolation, as well as the other passionate extremities of human thought: love, yearning, desire and, of course, beauty. The arts, lining up in their multitudes, beheld in close proximity, are capable of inducing a state of energised, exhilarated thought. Art can propel, electrify, becalm and restore. And perhaps make us reach for our best selves. My favourite work of art? Perhaps a volume of Lorca or Yeats, a line of Emily Dickinson. A novel that continues to linger is Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje and Dirt Music by Tim Winton is both epic and intimate.

Sir John Tusa
Managing director, Barbican Centre

If you look at the average audience in the National Theatre looking at a serious play, are there fewer adulterers or wife-beaters in that audience than in a football crowd? The chances are the answer is 'no'. On the other hand, if you think of a society without the arts, without cultivation and without ideas that come from the arts it will undoubtedly be a much less agreeable and much less civilised place, and I have no doubt whatever that we behave in a much better way because of the time we spend with the arts.

I'd put the high and low art debate as the difference between reflective art and entertainment art, and we can all tell the difference and we all like both. The idea that some people only like high art and don't like entertainment is the highest form of humbug. The great opportunity for television is that of course it can be, and at its best has been, a reflective art - and certainly a reporter of reflective art - and the challenge for it is to rediscover that particular mission. I do think that it is one of those strange ideas that we assume that the high arts or the reflective arts are enjoyed by comparatively few people. All the statistics suggest that large numbers of people enjoy them and use them.

I also think that ideas trickle through, they percolate. We look at pictures differently because of Picasso and we use words differently because of Joyce and Beckett.

I really like video art. There aren't very many video artists who I feel deliver at the highest level. Bill Viola certainly does and Christian Marclay and there is an extremely good Israeli artist called Michal Rovner. The work they do explores humanity and belief quite extraordinarily.

Geoff Dyer
Writer

The arts don't make us morally better people but they do enable us to discriminate more finely and this means that we live fuller, if not necessarily happier lives. At a time when the culture at large goads us towards an ever-coarsening response to almost everything, the demands made on our attention by 'difficult' art are to be especially valued. I look at Wayne Rooney's face and think, 'Now there's a fellow who's not read much Henry James.' But then I read The Golden Ball or whatever it's called, and it's so boring I end up watching football instead.

The distinction between high and low art is itself rather coarse and unhelpful (as Allen Ginsberg said, Dylan proved 'great art can be done on a jukebox'). I prefer to distinguish between all the good things - food, friends, books - that enhance your life and the overwhelming quantity of crap from which you need to avert your eyes if you're to avoid sinking into despair. My favourite work of art is a CD of a concert in which the great sarangi maestro Sultan Khan performs the stately Raga Bhupali. That lasts an hour, and then, as an encore, he sings this beautiful little Rajasthani folk song that doesn't even have a name. Is Sultan Khan a nice man? I've no idea, but listening to this, I find myself believing that part of the training to create such music is, surely, to purge yourself of all spite, pettiness and hate.

Jude Kelly
Founder/artistic director, Metal

Enduring artistic figures throughout history have usually fallen out with their own societies for being too radical, challenging or seemingly 'meaningless'. The subjectivity of the conservative critic-official or vox pop is constantly trying to force negative language into the artistic debate. 'High' and 'low' sounds like a thermometer reading - I just don't subscribe to the terminology. There are many amazing, original and superbly crafted works in all genres and I respect that fact.

If I had to choose only one piece of art, the collected works of Shakespeare would provide me with enough poetic nourishment, political thought and evidence of human paradox to last for years. But the outpouring of arts of every form and type is what thrills me about human creativity. It's like having many children, all different and all loved. Why choose? Since the Lascaux caves we've seen that artistic expression is fundamental to our own sense of being. Are cave paintings high or low art? I personally don't care.

Matthew Collings
Art critic and presenter

There is a lot of fascination about what the arts are at the moment. For me, visual art is the superior. Right now we're in an incredibly idiotic moment of visual arts, but it will get better and ultimately it is the most important art form, along with music. It's superior precisely because it doesn't have that literary quality, it's much more open to interpretation.

Do the arts make us better people? Yes, definitely and emphatically; except for visual art at this particular moment, where anything, say, Tracey Emin does is regarded as somehow important. But when visual art is right it makes us better people. It is almost what makes life worth living. After love and looking after your kids and your old mum, art is the next most important thing.

Is high art more valuable than low art? Yes, of course, that's why it's 'high' art. Gold is more valuable than water because there's more water around. Anything more rare is more valuable.

My favourite work of art has to be Rembrandt's self-portrait in Kenwood House. It shows ageing in the context of incredible skill.

Dominic Masters
Lead singer, the Others

When you're watching a play or listening to music it can take you away from yourself and enable you to analyse things. If a lyricist says something with meaning, it's open to interpretation. You can feed people the art but it's a subjective thing how they react to it. Francis Bacon is my favourite artist. He's given a lot within my lifetime. And I'm not choosing him because he's homosexual, it's not a pink-power vote. I like the rage and anger in his paint.

Tessa Jowell
Culture Secretary

The arts make us better people - not morally better but more thoughtful and more complex. Exposure to high art affects us over time; it affects our capacity to understand and relate, and it allows us to develop a personal heartland of images, sounds and expressions that we can draw on. I have two favourite paintings. The first is the portrait of Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio, my favourite painter, which hangs in the Galleria Doria-Pamphili in Rome. The second is Rembrandt's Girl at a Window in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in my constituency.

Lennie James
Actor and writer

The arts are vital - not the most important thing in the world, but as a key to a balanced education they're crucial. Art influences all parts of your life. Who's to say Otis Reading's 'Sittin' on the Dock of a Bay' is a lesser art form than the Mona Lisa? Good music can touch and inform you, and most importantly, introduce you to yourself. That's why art is important. It's a personal journey. In that sense it's unlike anything else. How do you relate to quantum physics?

Michael Eavis
Founder, Glastonbury festival

To me, art has the ability to take one out of oneself and into an expression of beauty or love, or even to a supernatural level, and in that context, William Blake's pictures come immediately to my mind. However, music to me is my greatest love, and the excess of it hasn't thwarted my appetite for it at all!

Ian Rankin
Novelist

The arts do not necessarily make us better people, as George Steiner argued so cogently in his book Language and Silence when he spoke of concentration camp guards who could listen to Beethoven, then head back to the gas chambers. I don't believe in high art and low art - I believe in good and bad art, but am open-minded enough to know that art I think one, others may think the other. The Richard and Judy Book Club scheme was derided by many as 'dumbing down', yet when put to a readers' vote, the favourite book was Cloud Atlas - by no means an easy book, and a book most people would regard as a work of art (though it didn't win the Booker, interestingly). My favourite work of art? Impossible to say: depending on my mood, I might posit Mozart's Requiem, Francis Bacon's Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion, Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, Gordon Banks's save from Pele, a Ronnie O'Sullivan break, Hawkwind's 'Silver Machine' or Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Or a thousand others.

John Carey: a life well read

Born in 1934; married with two sons.

Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, 1975-2001. Chair of the Booker Prize, 1982. Chief book reviewer for Sunday Times; regular panellist on BBC2's Newsnight Review

Carey's books include Milton (1969); The Violent Effigy: a Study of Dickens' Imagination (1973); Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (1977); John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992); and Pure Pleasure (2001).

'Likeable, wise and often right... one feels an attractive sense of partisanship in Carey's writing, an alliance with the ordinary, the plain-spoken... he writes with an Orwellian attention to decency' - James Wood

'Hornby may not spring to mind as the most obvious Dostoevsky lookalike, but his new novel seems to me well able to stand comparison with the great Russian's rambling fable' - Carey on Nick Hornby's How to Be Good (May 2001)