Ben Goldacre, who writes the excellent Bad Science column, sells T-shirts on his site with the slogan “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”. I’m often reminded of Goldacre’s caveat by current debates around the value and purpose of the arts in which there is a tendency to simplify, even to caricature, highly complex ideas. An obvious example is the polarisation of ideas between the so-called ‘instrumental’ and ‘intrinsic’ value of art. Commentators rarely even recognise the disputed understandings of what art is, still less the ideological basis of those understandings. It is indeed a bit more complicated. Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett enter these debates with the aim of challenging simplification and reconnecting contemporary policy positions with the long tradition of European thought they actually depend on. So, on the issue of instrumentalism, they reasonably observe that it “is, as a matter of fact, 2,500 years old rather than a degeneration brought about by contemporary funding regimes”. In their long perspective, it is the aestheticism of art for art’s sake that is a novel intellectual position.
The authors survey a vast field with indistinct boundaries – Western philosophy of art (using the term loosely) since Classical Greece. Though they are necessarily selective, one can only be impressed by the breadth and depth of their reading. They draw on the work of well-known thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Rousseau and Kant and obscure ones such as Tatian, Dacier, Piccolomini and Breuer. Among artists, it is writers whose ideas are mentioned most often: Flaubert, Arnold, Tolstoy, Hemingway and Kipling all appear. The result is both a literature review and an anthology of key texts. The citations often take as much space as the discussion they receive, but it is valuable to have so many important selections gathered in one place.
Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 978 0 230 57255 3 Buy from the AP Bookstore on our website www.artsprofessional.co.uk
The authors give much attention to the methodological challenges of writing intellectual history, discussing the problems of interpreting past cultures through contemporary ideas, of Eurocentrism and of rationales for classifying culture. They deal well and clearly with some philosophically subtle issues, such as the nature of knowledge and in what ways art that is invented can meaningfully be considered to offer truth, if at all. The core of the book considers eight categories of claims for the impact of the arts that the authors identify in the literature of the past two and a half millennia. These range from catharsis, education and moral improvement to its use in politics and the construction of identity. Their approach is even-handed, and they highlight important arguments for the negative effects of the arts first expressed by Plato but not much considered today outside the domain of popular culture where, for instance, film censorship is a direct descendant.
Reading such a range of diverse claims about the power and function of the arts prompts questions about the basis on which most of them are made. In the centuries before social research, on what foundations did Rousseau or Schopenhauer build their theories? How did Arnold propose to determine “the best which has been thought and said in the world”? It is often unclear whether some of these thinkers, however brilliant, are doing more than seeking to universalise personal experience. Hegemony develops when the powerful succeed in establishing their values, as natural and cultural history can be seen as a struggle between normalising and resisting ideologies. While the authors can hardly be reproached for omissions in a project of this scale, a discussion of reception theory – which sees the reader or audience as co-creator of an artwork’s meaning – might have introduced a different perspective to the claims of value made by artists and their supporters. Although the authors situate their work as a contribution to contemporary cultural policy debates and conclude by hoping that it will “be seen to have some relevance to the formulation of policies that govern the place of the arts in our public institutions”, their book actually makes few direct connections with the issues that preoccupy funding bodies or arts organisations. It does not, for instance, consider the difference between experience of the arts as a consumer and a producer, or a patron’s impact on an artist’s work. The book’s tone suggests that it was written primarily with students in mind and each chapter ends with a summary of its argument in classic textbook style. Arts professionals will find this an intellectually stimulating read but, despite the somewhat misleading title and a cover with pictures of art workshops, they will need to look elsewhere for consideration of current policy, evidence or practice. That is not a criticism: this book has a different purpose. Its great strength is to challenge readers to question their own beliefs and the necessarily ideological construction of debates about art and its value. If they put it down with a sense that things are indeed more complicated than they seemed the book will have done its work. And if, as a result, the quality of current discourse around cultural policy is improved, the authors will deserve much gratitude.
Review by François Matarasso.
e: matarasso@mac.com