Is Art Good for Us?
Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life
The bluntness of Joli Jensen’s title indicates the no-nonsense approach she takes to making a public case for the arts. A professor of communications at the University of Tulsa, Jensen cuts through the fuzzy (and unconvincing) logic that’s being offered as a defense of arts funding these days. Art, she insists, is not good because of what it does but because of what it is. If we are to make an effective argument for the arts, she writes, we must stop pretending that it can function as social medicine. The resulting book is, quite literally, required reading. I’m assigning this volume as the opening text for my "Cultural Policy and the Arts" graduate seminar this semester, because it frames, historicizes, and argues the essential questions so cogently.
Jensen makes her agenda clear from the outset: "to critique the consequences of all theories that treat art as something that comes in from the outside to transform us" (p. 187). Art is not magical. It doesn’t cure social ills, make us better citizens, or improve democracy. What’s important about art is not any inherent power to act upon individuals or society at large. What’s important about art is the opportunity it provides us to discuss with each other what we find meaningful, or not. To consider otherwise, she argues, misdiagnoses the sources of our social problems and prevents their true solutions, perpetrates flimsy claims devoid of empirical evidence, and perpetuates an elitist and insulting view of the arts that tells the masses what’s good for them. "Clearly," she writes, "many of us yearn to find an easy way to make our cities better, our lives safer, our children smarter. . . . But this is a dangerous illusion–we must stop imagining that we can inject children, classrooms, or communities with 'good culture’ and make them better" (p. 5).
In order to demonstrate the futility of the prevailing current claim for art an instrumental social value, Jensen undertakes a lengthy analysis of how we got here. Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville, she traces the public debate on art in American democracy through deft and penetrating close readings of major texts and debates. First she summarizes the ideas of Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, and Lewis Mumford and then sorts out a useful typology of early 20th century cultural theories: art as renewal, art as revolution, art as conservation, and art as subversion. She goes on to detail the conversation since the 1950s. "Art as Antidote: The Mass Culture Debates" outlines how "Art" became identified as "authentic," as a way to counteract the fake and pernicious effects of the mass media. "Art as Elixir: Contemporary Arts Discourse" scrutinizes the steps and mis-steps taken in the face of NEA defunding threats. "Art as Experience: John Dewey’s Aesthetics" sets out a corrective model, which she elaborates in "Conclusion: The Value of Expressive Logic."
Jensen calls us to replace an instrumental justification for the arts with an expressive model, which she adapts from the work of philosopher/educator John Dewey. "What would American social criticism be like if it cared about democratic possibilities, and valued artistic experience, but did not imagine art as an 'intervention’? What would happen if we let go of the presumption that art has the medicinal power to save or doom us?" (p. 171; original italic). To that end, Jensen redefines art as a social experience rather than an aesthetic object. It has no special predetermined status apart from the everyday world, and it possesses no inherent value that must be excavated by the so-called experts. Art is a field of experience—a social relationship—in which we all engage. And it is a field that is constantly evolving, along with the rest of society. For Jensen, Dewey’s model solves two fundamental problems. First, the categorical boundary that is traditionally drawn between "high" and "low" art. Second, the elitist position of critics and intellectuals who hold themselves above the rest of us as the arbiters of true culture.
If Jensen’s indictment of contemporary "intellectuals" (she’s never quite clear about who they are and where their power exerts itself) remains too overgeneralized to be convincing, she is right in describing the "calling" of the intellectual as "the possibility of sharing in the social conversation" (p. 186). We’ve spent so much time insisting that art produce a social effect that we’ve ignored the fact that we have virtually no social conversation about this effect. Art produces nothing without that social conversation, and without that social conversation, the public cannot know itself. "The public is muddled, confused, inchoate, to the extent that the means for social inquiry and conversation have not kept up with the changes in pace and scale in modern life. The problem is structural, not intellectual." (p. 190; original bold italic)
Jensen’s investment in the debate comes from a very specific position. As a communications scholar whose domain is mass media, she builds much of her case around the desire to vindicate mass culture. She is also suspicious of her own kind, the intellectuals she sees as maintaining the domain of "Art" in order to protect their own turf. In both instances, she may be broadly correct, but the lady doth protest too much. In fact, she’s setting up a straw man, overstating the degree to which anybody still considers high art as an antidote to the degrading effects of mass culture. If anything is privileged these days in academia, it’s mass culture. Studying "high culture" is retrograde. Furthermore, the field of performance studies dismantled the categories of "high" and "low" decades ago, supplanting them with the notion of a continuum of social practices.
The question of what constitutes an effective public policy argument is a separate one altogether. Jensen’s arguments work brilliantly in the rarefied universe of rhetoric. What remains to be worked out is how her argument can be extended into the public sphere, taking into account the vagaries of politics, and of the market. She does suggest that it is our "responsibility to maintain and enhance" the social relations of art "in selective ways" (p. 178), but she leaves unspecified what those "selective ways" might be.
Whether or not you agree with her conclusions, Jensen’s brand of clear-eyed analysis is what we need, if we’re not to concede the ground for case-making to the economists. The weak, embattled place of arts and culture in this country bespeaks the much-acknowledged failure of the arts community to articulate the role of the arts for today’s world. Jensen’s analysis, dense as it may be, is the kind of precise thinking that we need to sort through the muddled rhetoric and develop a coherent and broadly convincing justification for the arts in America. What’s at stake is the long-term vibrance and richness of our national culture.