Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

 
There's already been quite a bit of comment about John Carey's latest book:

"When it was published, The Intellectuals and the Masses was criticised for going too far in eliding British intellectuals' snobberies with fascist ideology, as if modernism taken to its logical conclusion would automatically lead to Nazism. Academic and critic Stefan Collini, for example, attacked Carey's "breathtaking tendentiousness" for seeing "Virginia Woolf's tart remarks about shop-girls or Eliot's sneers about typists [as] part of that disdain by intellectuals for ordinary people which reached its culmination in the death-camps"...

Carey takes an uncompromising relativist position on aesthetics, denying the possibility of absolute values. There is no way of determining what constitutes a work of art - Carey concludes that it is merely anything that anyone has defined as such - and evaluating such works is a purely subjective activity... It is the absence of God which, ultimately, leads him to deny the possibility that there can be absolute values in aesthetics, and indeed in ethics ("Once belief in God is removed, moral questions, like aesthetic questions, become endlessly disputable")."


As it happens I don't have any particular difficulty denying an absolute standard for aesthetic judgements; in practice such matters of taste have always been based around arbitrary distinctions that continually change and shift. Art has very often been an essentialy social concept and requiring it to be justifiable from first principles seems more than a little excessive. To put the issue in pragmatic terms, the absence of a solid foundation has surprisingly few implications for the superstructure as a whole. To fail to have a clear definition of aesthetic quality drawn from first principles is unlikely to prevent anyone from concerning themself with such matters or to change anyone's view of why such a definition might be needed. Culture can still be defended in the same terms that Arnold put forward as "contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world," or a Leavisite view or any number of other ideas and definitions.

Where Carey is correct is that one cannot do this if one wishes to reconcile an idea of culture with any thoroughgoing egalitarianism. Ideas of culture have more often than not tended to be formed by elites, often through patronage or subsidy in the absence of a free market. In modern history, the former Soviet Union was alone in retaining a central role for culture rather than leaving such matters to the free market (where they inevitably withered; it reminds me of Gianni Vattimo's notion that art, an implicitly subsersive force that undermines conventions and traditions, loses its privileged status and is forced to compensate for this by becoming increasingly self-referential and kitsch against the backdrop of an increasingly vapid culture). It does seem rather odd to me that Carey's liberalism extends to issues of equality but not as far suggesting any basis for culture other than the free market.

Update: This piece from Blake Morrison explains things more clearly:

"In pre-industrial societies, Carey argues, art was "spread through the whole community". But once the word "aesthetics" was coined in the mid-18th century, it became the preserve of a priestly caste. To Kant, art was good insofar as it accessed a "supersensible" realm of beauty and truth, and only certain kinds of artist - geniuses - were capable of that. Kant's view of art, as developed by Hegel and Schopenhauer, also required that the audience for art (readers, spectators and concert-goers) be unusually gifted. To expect the blind, striving creatures who composed the mass of humanity to appreciate art was clearly futile. The best that could be hoped was that, as one philanthropist involved in setting up the National Gallery in London put it, art might "wean them from polluting and debasing habits".

Snooty though it is, this view of art dominated much of the Romantic and Modernist period. Carey gives countless examples - and might have added to the list Henry Treece's physiologically intriguing claim that to be an artist is "to have your blood running a different way to other men's blood". The legacy persists to this day. There's Jeanette Winterson, for example, contrasting her own superior taste with that of her mother's preference for the "hideous" and "factory-made"."


Certainly a more clear explanation, but not necessarily a more helpful one. In particular, I have to admit to a rather considerable degree of scepticism as to whether this distinction between post and pre-industrial societies really stands examination. One of the dominant forms of art for much of the industrial and post-industrial age has been the novel, which has tended towards being the most popular of forms. Conversely, the pre-industrial period was very far from being a stranger to poetry and art that was essentially aristocratic, particularly when large swathes of the population would not have been able to read or have the luxury of being able to attend (state-subsidised) galleries or concerts.

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posted by Richard 6:37 pm