Is Art Good for Us?: Beliefs About High Culture in American Life

Rating:
Summary: Not as Medicine, at Least ...
Review: Think of the expression "patron of the arts." What image comes to mind?

Whether you thought of a guilt-driven corporate sponsor of public broadcasting, a wealthy individual endowing some form of "high culture," or another image entirely you probably didn't question that "the arts" are a decidedly good thing and are highly deserving of our "support." It would follow that high culture (painting, sculpture, ballet, "serious" music) needs more support than "low" culture (movies, comic books, dreadful pop music) because, well, it's *higher* and therefore better for us. Everyone says so--and "patrons" and other art-related sponsors are especially insistent.

But what if no evidence exists that "the arts" do us any good--at least by exposure? That the idea of art-as-medicine essentially represents nothing more than a historical aspiration foisted on us by a long line of utopian intellectuals?

Welcome to Joli Jensen's argument--supremely well-articulated in 'Is Art Good for Us?' From Alexis de Toqueville's 'Democracy in America' to our present day culture wars, Jensen surveys the embattled landscape of the role of the arts in our democracy. She concludes that today's "instrumental" view (high culture good, low culture--including, of course, the demonic media--bad) not only lacks evidence but distorts our public and private view of art. And is profoundly undemocratic to boot.

The sheer novelty of this thesis--and its ramifications ranging from private expression to public funding--is reason enough to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the contentious intersection of art and politics. But Jensen doesn't stop with novelty; some very earnest believers in art's transformational powers for democracy come in for some hard knocks: Walt Whitman, Lewis Mumford, pretty much every writer at The Partisan Review. Rarely have I read anything--book, article, website--that carpet-bombs the pretension of our nation's art intelligensia quite so effectively. From historical and simple evidence-gathering perspectives, the instrumental view of the arts stands--literally--on nothing.

The book's downside arrives in the final chapter when Jensen presents her favored alternative: an "expressive" tonic for the arts, largely promulgated by John Dewey (in the "Toquevillian" tradition). Dewey focuses on art as "communication" ("the creation and maintenance of common meanings") and--at least in this analysis--doesn't define it much further. But is that all it is? High or low, art is still (hopefully!) "... distinct from the everyday"-the "'esoteric' view of art" that Dewey combats. Ultimately he falls back on the "artfulness of the everyday"--a view Jensen admits is not far from the NEA's feel-good reasoning for increased government arts funding. This makes a nice contrast, but art--the aspiration of our better selves--deserves, well, better.

Dewey aside, my only other gripe with the author entails an occasional lapse into opaque academic jargon, to the point that one can barely stay with the topic at-hand. Subtitles like "The Limits of Counterbalance" and "Rhetorical Dramas Reconsidered" (to pick two at random) are a little too frequent for a book about art with such a clear (and radical) thesis.

Fortunately these negatives don't make much of a dent in the primary arguments. "It is far too easy to reify the arts as human and liberating, damn technology as mechanistic and constraining, and anoint ourselves seers and sages." If any part of that statement resonates with you (for good or ill), by all means read this book.