Sated on a diet of trashy fantasy and romance, I recently turned my attention to John Carey's latest offering (and when I say latest I mean came out ages ago but I was too stingy to buy it in hardback) What Good Are the Arts? I've always liked John Carey, in a slightly smug I got to see him being charismatic at undergraduates sort of way.

What Good Are the Arts is a bit of a schizophrenic book. In the first half Carey poses the Big Questions: What is a Work of Art? Is High Art Superior? Can Science Help? Do the Arts Make Us Better? Can Art Be a Religion? And his answers, to quote The Times, are, in brief: '''anything; no; not much; not as a rule; no.''' And, having thus debunked pretty much everything, in the slimmer second half of the book he goes on to make a case for literature as the superior art form - which would, I think, be more effective as polemic if the conclusions of the first half hadn't rendered such argument completely irrelevant.

It's an immensely readable and interesting book. It's witty, incisive and just generally pretty cool. Except I think I disagree with, well, most of it... and, having attended his seminars, I know disagreeing with John Carey is generally an indication of being a) wrong and b) about receive what has been termed his critical machete straight to your soft fleshy parts.

There ought to be a rhetorical term for adapting a stance of such universal coolness that anyone opposing such a stance automatically looks like a dick. I found something very similar with Brokeback Mountain. You see, I didn't like it - not because I object to gayness or cowboys or, heaven forefend, gay cowboys [1] - but because I thought it was a bad film and tedious in the extreme. The problem is that not liking Brokeback Mountain dumps you in with a lot of shotgun-toting right-wing Americans who think it's an abomination against, well, everything. And the problem with not quite agreeing with John Carey's gloriously all-encompassing and unfailingly charming liberalism is that you end up in the uber-elitist "barely sane" camp which includes people like Jeanette Winterson. It's argument ad hominem but in reverse.

I hope I'm not an elitist but I believe that "everything no no no no" is just a little too broad for both comfort and interest. And, speaking of unfair rhetorical devices, the book is full of them. It's very easy to demolish someone's argument if you quote less than a paragraph of it... I know this is the way it works but still. In his rush to demonstrate that his meaninglessly broad definition of art is the closest thing we can get to a correct one, Carey gives short shrift to those who were brave enough to try. I'm not saying that the insights of other thinkers are not flawed, but nor do they deserve to be dismissed as "farrago(s) of superstition and nonsense." For example, Carey quotes David Hume on classic art - that which has been "universally found to please in all countries and in all ages" - commenting that "There is nothing on earth that meets this criterion, except perhaps sexual intercourse and eating." This made me smile (and it's probably true) but Hume was, at least, genuinely engaging with the issue. And I find Carey's own conclusion "a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work only for that one person" bland, cowardly and dissatisfying.

I have been known to sneeze in aesthetically pleasing patterns but I doubt, even in that split-second of thinking "my, that's remarkably pretty for snot," I don't think that's ever going to be a work of art. Although, since the Tate Modern has purchased at least one can of shit perhaps I am wrong. Furthermore, although I agree with Carey's insistence that one cannot confer validity or the reverse on the aesthetic judgments of others I still can't help but hope and believe that there is... more to art than solipsistic subjectivity and a weight of cultural precedent.

Of course, I don't have a better definition to offer. If Kant and Hume (and Carey) can't do it I don't stand a chance.

In his "Do the arts make us better" chapter, Carey concludes that they don'''t, using (you can't get any cheaper than this I tell you) Hitler and Nazi Germany as part of his proof for this.

"Of course, preserving artworks for posterity can be made to appear simply prudent and responsible. But the prioritising of art over people that it implies is identical with, though less obviously horrifying than, the example of concentration camp commandants who enjoyed string quartets played by Jewish prisoners before executing them."

Is Carey really implying that there is a direct link between the art-conscious and the holocaust?! As an analogy to this, in the second half of the book, Carey mentions a project at a young offenders' institution in Durham which introduced nine young men to The Lord of the Flies. Unsurprisingly, there was an overwhelmingly positive response to this ... which is heart-warming but, nevertheless, not proof that reading books stops you committing violent crimes just as Nazi Germany is not proof that a valorisation of art makes it easier for you to commit genocide.

And, as anyone has spent any time on the internet will tell you, using Hitler or Nazi Germany as part of an argument, is cheating.

Furthermore, the link between the dominance of the arts in Nazi Germany and the events of the holocaust is spurious because "do the arts make us better" is not the same as "do the arts make us morally better." While an appreciation of the arts may not necessarily improve our morals, I would argue that the arts do, in fact, inspire the imagination, broaden the mind, and teach us new ways to think and feel ... in other words, that they do make us better.

I started out reading What Good Are the Arts in quite a liberal frame of mind and came out of it an exclusive-club-card-carrying elitist. Lacking a coherent definition of what art actually is, it seems pointless to engage in wrangling on whether there is such a thing as high art. But nevertheless Carey concludes that most of the arguments aimed at differentiating between high and low art (for lack of better terms) are unsustainable. For the most part, I agree. I do not believe that some forms of art are better than others - but then, lacking as it does any definition, my sense of what constitutes art is broad - and nor do I believe that "mass art" is synonymous with low art. However, even without a scientific basis for my conclusions and even without any real sense of how I have reached them, the fact of the matter is that some art is better than others. I know that's a terribly vague and unfashionable thing to say and I know it's probably not sustainable in the face of reasoned argument and I know it's not a real conclusion at all, but there it is.

I can't believe I'm going to do this but here's Jeanette Winterson on the subject:

There is no such thing as high and low art, there is only the real thing, and it comes very differently packaged and dosed at different strength.

One of my major irritations with What Good Are The Arts is that Carey seems to be using it to take potshots at Ms Winterson. In his postscript he responds, for the most part fairly, to some of the reviews the book received except in Jeanette Winterson's case. Now I don't know what's going on between those two but they should just grow up already!

Anyway, back to high art: I think the important distinction to make - and one which Carey does not allow - is that though something may not be high art it is nevertheless not without value. There is room for both Shakespeare and The Tribe in my life.

There seems to be a sense of "culture" being of finite capacity, like the bus in the Malibu advert. Concerns with high and low art (even whether or not there such a distinction to make) all spring from the same unconscious conviction: that there is only so much room on the bus and that if you squash an Atomic Kitten album on the front, Chopin'''s Nocturnes will fall off the back. When life is enriched by - and can encompass - both. But even if there's a fourteen year old girl somewhere who thinks that "I Want Your Love" is art that doesn't make it so. I'm not denying the value of "I Want Your Love" but I rather hope that when future generations look back on the defining artistic moments of the 21st century "I Want Your Love" isn't one of them. But then what do I know? In his day, Shakespeare was just a hack and aliens are probably boogeying to Atomic Kitten even now.

In the second half of the book, Carey makes his passionate case for literature. His criticism of prose and poetry is, as ever, a delight to read but it makes a rather strained conclusion to the first part of the book. He draws attention to the seeming inconsistency between the two parts of the book without making any attempt to explain or reconcile them:

"Just in case anyone should seize on [the aim of proving literature superior] as inconsistent with the relativist cast of the first part of my book, let me emphasize that all judgments made in this part, including the judgment of what literature is, are inevitably subjective."

Carey argues that literature is the superior art form because it can criticise, and even reject itself. It is "the only art capable of reasoning" he says, echoing Kant's dismissal of music quoted in the first chapter of the book. However, a lot of the examples of literature-criticising-and-rejecting-itself have been drawn from texts, like essays, that I would (subjectively) argue is only literature in the broadest sense of the word i.e. composed of words. And, yes, words are an effective medium for a certain type of communication because they can be used to express a thought or a feeling explicitly but to say that literature is superior because it is composed of words is as spurious (and unhelpful) as to say it is inferior because it is composed of words. You might as well say painting is superior because it is composed of paint and shows you a direct image. You might as well say music is superior because it is composed of notes and they can sound pleasant. Carey has already warned us that his judgments are completely subjective but they are as subjective as his definition of art is broad: so much so as to be rendered practically meaningless.

His second argument in favour of literature is that it possesses an "indistinctness" that empowers readers by appealing to the personal and subjective (there's that word again) nature of the individual imagination. This chapter, incidentally, is wonderful to read; Carey's insights and ardour are, as ever, inspiring. But the claim that literature supports multiple interpretations can apply to any of the arts; people have been arguing over what the Mona Lisa is smirking about for centuries, and will likely continue do so for centuries to come. And, despite Carey's talent for down-to-earth, easily understood criticism of classic texts, his ability to analyse and understand what is about certain words, phrases and images that make them so effective and appealing has been honed by a lifetime in academia. For Carey, Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth are dear old friends with whom he has had many a profound and intimate conversation. For others, these are slightly intimidating acquaintances with whom you've had stilted small-talk at a mutual friend's party. In other words, being able to engage with art has more to do with familiarity and experience. I enjoy paintings and opera and, for that matter, R&B and comic books, but I gain more out of an interaction with literature because I understand it in more depth. This does not make literature superior, it makes my ability to engage with R&B inferior.

To take a specific example, a long time ago a boyfriend recommended that I read Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. When the boyfriend asked me what I thought of it, I said I thought it was an excellent book about loneliness. My boyfriend was surprised because he had thought it was a book about fairies. I am not making a value judgment on his interpretation over mine but, nevertheless, mine was the richer experience because I have been taught (as the young men in the Deerholt Young Offenders Institute were taught) to read books in that kind of way. It was not any quality inherent in the composition of the book itself that allowed me to do so.

What Good Are the Arts? is a book as fascinating for its flaws as for its virtues and, although I found I disagreed with the few conclusions it offers, I certainly agreed with the questions it asks. But if literature needs to someone to tilt at windmills on its behalf, I don't think it could do any better than John Carey. Hell, I'll even hold his donkey while he does.

[1] although technically they were shepherds, dammit, shepherds. And they also weren't gay.