WHAT is art for and what good does it do? Two centuries ago, Kant and Hegel spent much of their lives contemplating questions about art and aesthetics. Many others have done so since. The latest are two studies, from either side of the Atlantic, by Michael Kimmelman and John Carey. The authors are professionally involved in the arts, Mr Kimmelman as chief art critic at the New York Times and Mr Carey as a professor of English literature at Oxford University. Scholars both, they are prodigious readers, listeners to, and students of, art. Yet both their books are at their most impressive when the authors seem to be trying the least.
Mr Kimmelman, a gifted piano student as a boy, returned more seriously to the keyboard in 1999 when he entered, and went on to the final round, of an amateur piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Organised by the Van Cliburn Foundation, which since 1962 has presented the world's leading piano competition for young professionals, the competition brought 90 people, who neither taught nor performed professionally, to Texas.
Mr Kimmelman's article about his fellow pianists—a numismatist, two flight attendants, a hairstylist and a former crack addict who had been jailed for burglary and who found taking up music helped him recover—raised a sizeable correspondence from people who are not artists by profession, but for whom art adds an important other dimension to their lives. It was this idea, so emblematic of the author's own life, that spawned the book.
“I have come to feel”, he writes, “that everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art. Put differently, this book is, in part, about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.”
The portraits Mr Kimmelman presents in order to illustrate his point are loosely associated. There is the artist who created without lifting a finger: Ray Johnson, a coolly analytical man who was fascinated by numbers and who killed himself a decade ago at the age of 67 on January 13th (6+7=13, his friends noted), having first telephoned an old colleague, William Wilson, whose name contains 13 letters. There is the accidental artist: a German policeman photographed for posterity in 1927 hanging on to the bottom of a zeppelin that had broken its moorings. And there is the illuminating artist, a Baltimore dentist who, in the course of a lifetime, collected 75,000 lightbulbs and created the Museum of Incandescent Lighting.
But his best example is Pierre Bonnard, whose accidental encounter with a young, elfin woman alighting from a Paris tram in 1893 led to an intense relationship that would last until her death half a century later. Easily derided after his death as a facile, if accomplished, colourist, it is Bonnard's secretive, moody portraits of the woman, Marthe, many of them posed in the privacy of her bathroom, that mark him out as a painter of elegy. Often described as a painter of pleasure, one critic observed, he was something even more rare: a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure.
Mr Kimmelman's book works best when he describes the ineffable by showing rather than telling. His brief anecdote about how Bonnard once asked a model not to sit still, but to move around the room, is far more effective than a convoluted explanation about the difficulty of painting presence and absence at once.
Too much telling, by contrast, is Mr Carey's error. What is a work of art, is high art superior, do the arts make us better, can art be a religion? One after the other, Mr Carey head-butts these questions. The result, however, is that he ties himself up in knots. Unable to reach any conclusion about what art is, he turns instead to what it is not. There are plenty of things that are not works of art: for example, human excrement. Probably. But what about Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died in 1963 after creating an “edition” of 90 tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement? The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and the Pompidou Centre snapped them up. More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.
Far, far better is the second half of the book in which Mr Carey seeks to persuade us that the greatest of all art forms is not painting or music but literature, and English literature specifically. Uninflected and without gendered nouns, English was uniquely placed to offer Shakespeare the linguistic pliancy and suppleness he needed to turn out the epidemic of metaphors and similes that so mark his work. Here, Mr Carey turns in a bravura performance. Drawing on his great knowledge of poetry, he is able to show how literature outsmarts other art forms; how it alone is able to criticise itself, which makes it more powerful and self-aware than other forms; how only literature can comment, and therefore moralise, not by making you more moral but by giving you ideas to think with; and how by hinting rather than spelling out, it is literature's indistinctness that empowers the reader's imagination.
Read every word of Mr Kimmelman for ideas to think with, and start Mr Carey's book on page 171. You won't regret it.
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