What Good Are the Arts [Hardcover]

Hailed as exhilarating and suggestive (Spectator), thought-provoking and entertaining (David Lodge,Sunday Times), and incisive and inspirational (Guardian),What Good are the Arts?offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--here cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgments about art are anything more than personal opinion. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that anyone seriously interested in the arts should read (Michael Dirda,The Washington Post).

An intensely argued polemic against the intellectually supercilious, the snooty rich and the worship of high culture as a secular religion for the spiritually refined and socially heartless. Anyone seriously interested in the arts should read it. --Michael Dirda,Washington Post Book World

Smart, saucy. --Newsday

Anyone who still insists on lecturing us about 'high' culture and its superiority to 'mass' culture should be made to read John Carey's 'What Good Are the Arts?'.... Carey defines art, tells us what it's good for and has enormous fun dismantling the claims of aesthetic theorists, from Kant onward. It's been a long time since I've read a saner book. --Nick Hornby, Favorite Book of 2005 selection,Los Angeles Times Book Review

Brilliant, funny, and insightful.... Makes a compelling and persuasive case that creative expression--especiallyld