Vol. 27 No. 12 · 23 June 2005
pages 21-22 | 2826 words
Yearning for the ‘Utile’
Frank Kermode
- What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey
Faber, 286 pp, £12.99, June 2005, ISBN 0 571 22602 7
John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the chief reviewer of the Sunday Times, a BBC sage, a sought-after chairman of panels, a man well known for his strong opinions on all matters to do with literature and the other arts. These opinions he expresses with unusual force and directness; his manner, as his blurb says, is ‘important and provocative’, whether pronounced ex cathedra in Oxford or in allocutions to a wider public.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 14 · 21 July 2005
From Catherine Conybeare
Frank Kermode’s discussion of John Carey’s quest for the utile in art (LRB, 23 June) reminded me of Hal Foster’s disdainful piece on the Christo Gates in Central Park (LRB, 3 March). No, art probably cannot make the individual morally ‘better’, certainly not in any empirically demonstrable way. But these writers seem to be thinking primarily of the private experience of an individual when confronted with a so-called ‘work of art’. All three underemphasise the importance of the communal experience of art. The Christo Gates were an excellent example of this. Perhaps, as Foster suggested, they were negligible as pieces of contemporary art. But the aura of celebration in Central Park on those chilly grey days at the turn of the year, in the middle of a city which since 11 September 2001 has repeatedly been told to be afraid, and where public gatherings have periodically been banned (not least those planned in Central Park during the Republican Convention last year), was far from negligible. It may not have made any of the individuals thronging beneath the orange banners ‘better’, but for the city as a whole – or rather, the civitas, that shifting community of individuals which adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts – its value was palpable.
Catherine Conybeare
Bryn Mawr College
Vol. 27 No. 15 · 4 August 2005
From Raymond Clayton
Frank Kermode seems to accept that the ‘high arts’ serve the enjoyment only of an educated elite (LRB, 23 June). I am reminded of my experience as a Bevin Boy in the East Lancashire coalmines at the end of the Second World War. I was just out of grammar school and, enthralled by my recent discovery of classical music, whistled themes from symphonies, concertos and sonatas incessantly. One day, as I trudged, whistling, in a line of other miners, down a dusty tunnel to my work station, I got a tap on the shoulder. The man behind me was a grizzled old-timer, stooped and scarred from years of work underground. ‘Tha shouldn’t whistle Beethoven in t’ pit,’ he said. ‘When tha whistles, tha ’ears th’ole orchestra, but we only ’ears thee whistlin’.’
Raymond Clayton
Stanford, California
