art beat / By Katherine Almy

What Good is Art?

High and low art and art for everyone

(Dec. 27, 2007)  It’s a cold and rainy afternoon. Christmas is upon me, and then the New Year. A time to reflect, and what I’ve been thinking about is why I write this column (roughly) every two weeks. I often feel like I’m shouting in the wind. Why do I bother writing about art and artists when people are being bombed in Iraq, or murdered in the streets right here at home? Why is art so important?

The day that three jet airplanes filled with people slammed into buildings filled with more people and sent them crashing to the ground, I was scheduled to meet with some folks at the Humboldt Arts Council to help plan a big event. Harvest of the Arts, it was called — “a celebration of creativity” — scheduled for Sept. 30, 2001. I called Debbie Goodwin, then executive director of HAC, and we wondered what the hell we were doing. Were we wasting our time with a bunch of nonsense when the world was going crazy?

GALLERY >

What Good Are the Arts? John Carey asks that question in his 2005 book of the same name. When I found out about it, of course I had to get it. It’s a great read (if you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend you run out and get it as soon as you finish reading this paper), and he makes some scathing comments about the pretentiousness and corruption of the art world. Like anything else that humans do, we often take a good thing and make something rotten out of it, and art is no exception.

My biggest frustration with art is the way it so often is used to divide people. Carey states that, “‘high’ art, assures you of your specialness. It inscribes you in the book of life, from which the nameless masses are excluded.”

Esoteric art full of obscure symbolism and heady academic references is all too often used as a way to say, “you just don’t understand because you’re not as sensitive as I am.”

And it’s not just the rich and powerful excluding the rest of us “riff-raff.” All kinds of groups use art or cultural icons as a way to include like-minded people and exclude others, as in, “It’s a black thing,” or “It’s a female thing.” While we desperately seek to be understood, sometimes it’s comforting to include yourself in a group and push away another group because they just don’t get you.

And thus you have the culture wars — “high art” versus popular or “pop art.” Each side claiming to be the more enlightened, the more deserving, while the other side is simply not quite human enough to join in camaraderie of the shared expression. So is this all that art is, a way of thumbing your nose at someone and saying, “Yanh, yanh, I’m more aesthetically attuned then you are!”

“The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic,” Carey states. But he then goes on to say, “It is time we gave active art a chance to make us better.”

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