Brillo boxes and marble nudes

Professor John Carey is at his most acerbic, combative and impassioned in this brilliant polemic, developed from lectures he gave at University College London last year. Just don’t expect the question proposed by the title to be satisfactorily answered: Carey doesn’t exactly contradict himself — he’s far too fly for that — but halfway through, he executes an audacious volte-face that makes his arguments even more dizzyingly provocative.

Taking positions he established in The Intellectuals and the Masses as his starting-point, Carey lays into the snobs, dilettantes and academics who have busily been carving a religion out of the arts ever since Baumgarten proposed a philosophy of aesthetics in the 1750s. Under their influence, ‘the arts’ have evolved into a substitute for ethics, a realm in which an elite basks at leisure, looking down at the unwashed and uneducated.

Classicism presented art as a means of reflecting or perfecting nature, while the Romantics decided it was an escape from reality and an altogether better place. Modernism was all about navel-gazing, creating art that took itself as its primary subject, and smashing all the hierarchies of beauty and sublimity in its insistence that a urinal or a Brillo box had as much right to be called art as a marble nude.

Carey’s scepticism, both as moralist and logician, as he charts this progress is corrosive. Having shown that cognitive and behavioural science can offer no significant verifiable insight into our responses to a painting or poem, he jumps gleefully into what he labels ‘the abyss of relativism’ and asserts that ‘anything is a work of art, if someone thinks it is’. Distinctions between high and mass art are nakedly ideological — grand or soap opera, who’s to define which is better? He doesn’t quite go on to say that one man’s taste in the stuff is as good as anyone else’s, but given his egalitarian drive, he might as well.