I instinctively recoil from the central argument of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? though I’m not sure I should. His position is deliberately deflationary. Art is whatever anyone says it is. There is no objective standard of taste. Kant and Hegel were mystifiers, and the reverence we attach to great art serves the interests of a cultural priesthood. A work of art is a work of art if it’s a work of art for you. It’s cleanly argued, great fun and bracing. My resistance may owe more to conditioning than to reason.
He is strongest when attacking the institutional apparatus. The art world operates as a gated community. The confidence with which curators and critics pronounce on what matters is often a power move dressed as aesthetics, and Carey is right to say so. He is strong too on the claim that art makes us morally better, which he dismantles with biographical evidence: cultured monsters, Nazi officers steeped in Beethoven and Goethe, string quartets playing in concentration camps. George Steiner made similar observations. They are hard to dismiss, but argument by analogy occasionally overreaches. The camps are a context where almost every human capacity broke down. That aesthetic experience also failed there tells us something about extremity, not about art. Carey proves art isn’t sufficient for moral development. That’s a weaker claim than the one he wants, which is that art has no moral dimension at all.
His use of immortal annoyed me most. He takes the word literally and argues that since nothing survives forever, the claim that great art endures is meaningless. Nobody who calls a work immortal is making a cosmological claim. They mean something has outlasted its creator and still speaks. The argument is self-defeating in any case: if ultimate impermanence invalidates art, it equally invalidates the literary experience that Carey later champions. You cannot selectively deploy nihilism against the positions you dislike and exempt your own. It’s a sixth-form argument wearing a gown.
Where Carey is most powerful, and most politically angry, is on arts education. He tells the story of the Arts Council after the war: the fork between investing in places people could go to see or hear art, and investing in chances to make or play it. They chose access over participation. In practice this meant building institutions where the public could consume art already validated by existing taste-makers. It looks egalitarian but isn’t. It reinforces the very hierarchy Carey spends the rest of the book attacking. His argument that every child should be given a chance to play every instrument is deeply persuasive. If you believe art matters, the response is not another concert hall. It is putting a violin or a trumpet or a piano in front of every child and seeing what happens.
The distance between that aspiration and reality in the UK is now a class divide of colossal proportions. A child at a good private school will have multiple instruments, ensemble playing, drama, art studios, modern languages from seven. The state school equivalent has been hollowed out since at least Thatcher, accelerated under austerity and never reversed, regardless of each government’s political persuasion. Music in many state schools now depends on parental fundraising or charity. Successive governments have dismantled arts and humanities and languages from state education, and the children going to private school leave with an advantage that compounds across everything.
Carey on prisons cuts the same way. If creative engagement transforms people, and the prison arts programmes show that it does, then the world prisoners re-enter is structured to exclude them from exactly those experiences. The same political class that funds prison arts because they reduce reoffending will defund the community provision that might have reached those people before they ended up inside. Art is powerful enough to rehabilitate but not important enough to provide universally. It is a deep hypocrisy, and Carey’s anger here is merited.
But the central question remains. Any position suggesting a piece of conceptual art sponsored by Saatchi and sustained by art-world consensus stands on the same level as Rembrandt or Caravaggio, or that an inane pop tune is the equivalent of the Well-Tempered Clavier: I find I cannot follow him there, though I recognise I cannot separate my judgment from the education that produced it. Carey is right that no objective metric proves the hierarchy. Every attempt smuggles in the assumptions it claims to prove, but there is a difference between being unable to prove the hierarchy and it not existing. Stand in front of a Caravaggio and something operates on multiple levels at once: technical mastery, psychological depth, compositional daring, a conversation with centuries of tradition while being shockingly immediate. The claim that there is no meaningful distinction in achievement is one almost nobody lives by, including most who theoretically defend it. Carey himself doesn’t live by it. His passion for certain writers, the seriousness with which he treats literature, betrays a man who in practice believes some art is better than other art. His critical instincts are more honest than his thesis.
You feel the Oxford English professor raging at his own milieu. He just about pulls it off, because he engages properly with the positions he dismantles rather than straw-manning them, and because his alternative is not nihilistic. He argues something personal and honestly felt. A book that sharpened what I already thought rather than changing my mind. I intend to write separately about his final section, where he makes a special case for literature. He is right to, and that may be where the book is most interesting.