Galleries framed on fraud charge

John Carey rants about aesthetic approaches to art but defends his love of literature, says Charles Saumarez Smith

John Carey, the former Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, has published an odd and combative book based on his Northcliffe lectures. Roughly two thirds of it consists of a rant against all those artists and writers and philosophers since Kant who have believed that there might be some deep aesthetic value, which is worth trying to describe, in the experience of some, but not all, works of art. He does not share this belief and, instead, holds the view that anyone who thinks that high culture has some special value is a snob, an intellectual fraud or both.

Carey starts with a statement that no one would have understood the concept of art before the late 18th century: "You might say that the question 'What is a work of art?' could not have been asked before the late 18th century, because until then no works of art existed." This is characteristic of his intellectual method. It sounds smart. But it suggests that he has perhaps not heard of Leonardo or Raphael or Michelangelo or the writings of Vasari, and he does not bother to list in his bibliography any books on the subject of Renaissance aesthetics such as David Summers's The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics.

Carey then proceeds to an arbitrary and casual dismissal of the writings of Kant on the basis that Kant must have been a nut to think that there were higher and more lasting values in the experience of art than those that are arrived at arbitrarily and subjectively by an individual. It is perfectly possible to concede that the search for universal values in art has proved a chimera; but Carey goes on to suggest on this basis that there can be no such thing as common judgment, no benefit in the search for why some people experience works of art with a special critical understanding, no idea that some works of art can inspire and enrich and fortify the life and imagination of individuals, as most intellectuals and writers and philosophers have believed over the past 200 years. Kant was wrong.

Schopenhauer was wrong. Contemporary critics such as Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto are wrong. Carey approaches them all as the man on the street, an ex-barman, finding some quotation from their works that he can easily mock.

It turns out that what Carey likes is popular art, which he wants to rescue from the condescension of aesthetic snobs. He admires Noel Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art . And he particularly respects the findings of Dorothy Hobson, who discovered in a work of recent sociology that viewers of the TV soap Crossroads take as much pleasure in discussing its events as someone who is listening to Bach or Beethoven. He is also keen on the views of those people in the postwar Arts Council who thought that public subsidy should not go to centres of excellence, but should be used to encourage individual creative practice, and on those who encourage art in prisons, which is a logical position since he believes that the artwork of prisoners is no better and no worse than that of anyone else. It is all a matter of individual judgement, and Carey's judgement of art is just as good as anyone else's.

The first five chapters are spent dismissing all the various branches of writings on aesthetics, including a great number of gratuitous sideswipes against people whose writings Carey dislikes, such as Chris Smith, the former Minister of Culture, whom he accuses of writing banal and evasive claptrap, and Neil Macgregor, the director of the British Museum, who he claims cannot provide any factual evidence for the belief that exposure to high art is morally and spiritually beneficial (one is tempted to ask: if looking at pictures provides no sense of visual, spiritual and cultural benefit, then why on earth do so many people take pleasure in it?).

Most bizarrely, he regrets and cannot understand why the trustees of the National Gallery made efforts to save the paintings in its holdings from bombs in the Second World War. I hate to think what an art historian must have done to him, because he assumes, only occasionally correctly, that everyone interested in art must be driven by snobbery.

In chapter six, Carey suddenly changes tack. Having spent five chapters writing in an excoriating way about the worthlessness of art, he suddenly decides that he must launch a defence of his own subject, literature.

Suddenly, the whole way he writes and his tone of voice changes.

Instead of writing brutally and in an ostentatiously philistine way, it turns out that he loves literature, partly, of course, because it is itself often dismissive of high culture - he scoffs at E.M. Forster but loves Dickens, he likes Browning because he is anti art-loving dukes, and he particularly admires Johnson and Swift because satire is his favourite genre.

In his final chapter, Carey launches a defence of literature based on his own idea that the best thing about it is "indistinctness". At this point, it is tempting to hear the voice through which he himself - in the first half of the book - would have dismissed such a feeble and intellectually pathetic idea, as if the only thing that is worthwhile about the whole history of English literature, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Conrad and Matthew Arnold, is that it is incompletely comprehensible. But I would not want to be so cheap. Suffice it to say, it is evident that Carey is quite capable of writing intelligently and thoughtfully and persuasively about literature when he chooses to and of revealing, through careful criticism, the nature of literary, if not artistic, value.

Charles Saumarez Smith is director, the National Gallery.