What Good are the Arts? - John Carey

For art philosophers, the 2006 book by an English lit. professor John Carey (he was previously a barman, beekeeper, in the army etc too) called "What Good are the Arts?" is recommended. The author outlined the arguments at the launch of the 2006 Dublin Writers Festival, where I was in the audience.

Basically he challenges the snobbery attached to high-brow art, contesting that because of how cultures' taste changes, sometimes quite dramatically e.g. modern art, through time; because a whole range of activities produce the same reported elation as art does for various people; and we cannot inhabit the consciousness of another person to check consistency of effect of, say the Mona Lisa, the arts don't necessarily make us better people, and have no reliably replicable effects. At a grass-roots level of participation, the benefits are pretty much indisputed, and all societies show evidence of this, even if not naming it as such (some call it 'play') A preference for any work of art, he concluded from his impressively wide research (e.g scientific MRI results, Hitler's generous art patronage, anecdotes from the art world, poetry quotes) is in fact absolutely subjective, which means that, for example, when Morrissey sings: "To me you are a work of art", he captures this truth in a single phrase.

The review by The Guardian online elaborates further: Review: What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey | Books | The Guardian