Carey on art, football and happiness
John Carey, the distinguished Oxford textual scholar and chief literary critic of The Sunday Times, is sure to kick up some sand along the summer beaches with his newest work, What Good Are the Arts? A truly derisive passage is reserved for John Tusa, managing director of the Barbican Centre, for claiming that opera is "demanding" and "difficult". Carey asks: "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's work."
From the 19 June Observer magazine "Up Front" profile of Carey, a few tart observations:
Football is sad. It is such an illusion. People feel that have achieved something when their team wins, but of course they haven't. They're just desperate for some sense of achievement. Also, it is mindless, and the fact that it occupies such a central place in our culture suggests what a desperate state we are in.Pursuing happiness is futile. You find happiness pursuing something quite other.
When kids in Oxford take their degrees now, they have a ceremony called 'trashing', where they throw eggs, flour and wine over each other. When the starvation starts, I hope they are the first to feel it.
Carey's life-long antipathy to snobbishness and pretension has made him an enemy of the art elite, while his clarity exposes so much of the hypocrisy that's come to define "artistic expression". In a world of waffle, his lucidity is startling: "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person." John Carey, a voice of reason.
Comments
When the starvation starts, I hope they are the first to feel it.
Hmmm. I should applaud a "life-long antipathy to snobbishness and pretension", not to mention hooliganish graduation rituals, but this sounds very much as if he meant to say, Please let the starvation start, so that they may feel it.
In the US we also have stupid graduation rituals, usually confined to writing dumb things on one's mortarboard, tossing balloons, hooting, and so forth. (Or at least, they do now -- kids today, tsk.)
At the Australian university I was acquainted with, many of the students were Asians whose parents had slaved to send them to an Australian school. At graduation time there'd be flocks of beautiful, well-dressed, egg-free kids, the girls clutching flowers and (why?) teddy bears. Their parents would be in attendance, beaming. Caucasians generally made themselves scarce; I don't know what they did for graduation.
Posted by: Angie Schultz | July 16, 2005 7:27 PM
His comments on football are ridiculous and worthy of serious mockery.
Men who don't like football are suspect.
Posted by: arseblogger | July 16, 2005 11:01 PM
Arseblogger said that men who don't like football are suspect. I say: women who don't like football are also suspect!
Posted by: Arnie | July 17, 2005 8:21 PM
Much as I enjoy Prof. Carey's writing, his comments on opera are facile. It's easy to sit on one's arse anywhere and listen to music, whereas it's a worthwhile challenge to develop the tools to enjoy "high art" to the full. Does not Carey say "happiness is in the pursuit of something quite other [than happiness]". Can't think of a better example than the pursuit of music appreciation.
And his definition of a "work of art" is hamfisted and designed rather to fit with his antipathy to "snobbery" than with an assessment of aesthetic value. It would be far better to say "a work of art is anything which is offered as such by its author", after which it is for the observer to judge whether it is good art or bad art, or successful or a failure.
Posted by: dr copernicus | July 18, 2005 3:17 PM