The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun

The Use and Abuse of Art Reviews

• 
  Paul Bryant

  I found my notes to this book in a box in the loft (part of what will become known as “The Bryant Papers” in a few decades, I’m sure). These notes are nothing more or less than a Complete Theory of Art, and Art here means Everything , from Rheims cathedral to South Park. So, here it is. I’m sure most of this is Barzun’s ideas, but I’m pretty sure I added and tweaked a bit too, and it’s my list of examples at the end. So :
  
  THE VERY SHORT BUT COMPLETE THEORY OF ART
  
  Art performs one or more of three functions:
  
  1) decorative (aesthetic). JB calls this “art as the enhancer of life”.
  
  2) Self-expressive (which may be called therapeutic). JB calls this “art as a sanctuary… art as better than life… a truer reality”.
  
  3) Ideological (aka inspirational) which subdivides into a) philosophical/religious, and b) political. JB calls this “art as the detergent of life… art for a better life”.
  
  Furthermore, all art in these categories can be presented in two distinct modes:
  
  i) the lyric – the celebratory, the incantation, the expression of depth, the interior
  
  ii) the narrative – an incarnation within a sequence of events, the expression of breadth, the exterior
  
  In order to make all this abstraction clearer, here are examples of each function and each mode. Not all are a perfect fit.
  
  THE NOVEL
  
  Decorative/lyric : The Waves by Virginia Woolf (not all novels employ plot & narrative and this one is more like poetry)
  Decorative/narrative : any comedy or detective story, so let’s say The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, or Right Oh, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. These novels are wonderful decorations.
  
  Self-expressive/lyric : Proust! I don’t think people read him for the galloping page-turning heart-thumping twists and turns of the plot.
  Self-expressive/narrative : any autobiographical novel – say Sons & Lovers by D H Lawrence or The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien – I love that one.
  
  
  Ideological/lyric : I guess this would be any major statement by an author in the form of a novel, so Utopia by Thomas Moore or the Fountainhead by Ayn rand would do – again, you don’t read these for the story
  Ideological/narrative : there are hundreds – Germinal by Zola, The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, anything by Upton Sinclair
  
  PAINTING
  
  Decorative/lyric : all Bracque’s cubist stuff, all Fauvism, Matisse
  Decorative/narrative : Renoir’s lovely illustrations of Parisian life – les Parapluies will do nicely, or Her First Outing.
  
  Self-expressive/lyric : all your abstract impressionists fit here, Pollock, Rothko
  Self-expressive/narrative : The Beatitudes of Love by Stanley Spencer, all about his own odd life, and very moving
  
  Ideological/lyric : all propaganda posters, Soviet social realism
  Ideological/narrative : Guernica by Picasso
  
  POPULAR SONG
  
  Decorative/lyric : arguably the majority of pop songs exist just to decorate our lives and nothing more. Hello Goodbye by The Beatles is an example of a particularly meaningless song which I happen to like a lot but couldn’t really tell you why.
  Decorative/narrative : comedy songs will do here – let’s say Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West by Bennie Hill or With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock by George Formby (I hope you know that one!)
  
  Self-expressive/lyric : here come all the mournful singer songwriters – Mother by John Lennon, Sara by Bob Dylan. The great mass of blues songs fit in here too.
  Self-expressive/narrative : The last Time I saw Richard by Joni Mitchell or Ballad of John and Yoko by the moptops
  
  Ideological/lyric : Four Women by Nina Simone; Crime in the City by Neil Young; What’s the matter Here by 10,000 Maniacs
  Ideological/narrative : Deportee by Woody Guthrie (The Byrds do a great version); The lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll by Dylan; Hurricane by Dylan; Only a Pawn in their Game by Dylan!
  
  POETRY
  
  
  Decorative/lyric : You’re by Sylvia Plath
  Decorative/narrative The Eve of St Agnes by jovial John Keats; The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll
  
  Self-expressive/lyric : Poem on my Birthday by Dylan Thomas
  Self-expressive/narrative : In memoriam by Tennyson
  
  Ideological/lyric : all your great World War One poets
  Ideological/narrative : Essay on Man by Pope
  
  MOVIES
  
  Decorative/lyric : musicals often have little or no narrative content, just the thinnest excuse for a story to drape the songs and routines over, so any Fred Astaire film fits here, or more recently Moulin Rouge (was there any story in that one at all?)
  Decorative/narrative : superhero movies, caper movies like Oceans 12, Bourne Identity, all that stuff
  
  Self-expressive/lyric : Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, Pan’s Labyrinth; The Long Day Closes; Me and You and Everyone we Know
  Self-expressive/narrative : Diner, Slacker; Hollywood Shuffle; In America
  
  Ideological/lyric : Human Nature
  Ideological/narrative: The Godfather trilogy; Boyz n the Hood; The Rapture (I really want to see that one again but it's not available, grrr)
  
  Well, it's a game anyone can play. I found M. Barzun to be a very stimulating companion.
  
  
• 
  Christine Sunderland

  An excellent, concise, brilliant analysis of how art has replaced religion in the last century. I now understand why so much of "modern" art I find bewildering, depressing, and offensive. The arrogance of the cult of art - those in the know - is also revealed for what it is. This book is a happy vindication of my instincts about the entire question of modernity. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand today's culture.
• 
  Janice

  I have to begin this review by saying I am a huge fan of Jacques Barzun. After being introduced to him through reading Dawn of Decadence when it was published I have read as many of his books as I can find. He has an acute sense of culture and history and is a straight forward writer. I was not disappointed in this book. There are six chapters that were each a lecture given as part of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Barzun has insights into the development of modern art that seem right on. I teach an omnibus class that discusses art and I learned so much by reading this book that I can't wait to share in class. I do wonder what further insights Barzun has about art since 30 plus years have passed since he wrote it in 1973. If you are interested in the state of art and wonder how we got to the point we are today read it for some thought provoking ideas
• 
  Toran

  The best work of cultural criticism I've ever read. Most of the time I pick up something that tries to analyze culture its filled with obvious cliches and a whole lot of "well that whole chapter did nothing but explain the obvious", but not this book. The Use and Abuse of Art penetrates right into the heart of how we look at, looked at, and may yet look at Art and other major cultural institutions like Science and Politics. Just about every single paragraph made me stop reading and think about what was being said and the full extent of the insights it offered. If I was more well versed on the classic authors from centuries past that Barzun casually namedrops frequently I imagine I would have gotten even more still from this book but as it stands its still an easy 5/5 for me.
  
  If everyone who wanted to write professionally about Art had to read this book first we would surely speak about Art in a much better way than we do now.
• 
  Maxwell Foley

  Really managed to crystallize a bunch of scattered ideas swirling around in my head about why art is so fucked up, and why people are so fucked up too I guess. The ideas in this short book are quite forcefully presented meditations on, like, "the Western soul" and other abstract philosophical entities , yet all ended up feeling instinctively true to me, in a 'when-you-see-it-you-can't-not-see it' sort of way. It's as if the inscrutable people we know of as art-lovers and artists have clumsily dropped their scripts and notes and now we can pick the mess up off the floor and read it all to figure out exactly what these guys are all about.
  
  I'll do my best to summarize the thesis here as simply as I can:
  
  At some point in the midst of the age of Enlightenment, thoughtful souls began to feel that there needed to be something in life to guide us beyond rationality and empiricism, yet few wanted to go back to the old religious ways. Art (with a capital A) was settled on as encapsulating what this supra-rational force should be.
  
  Therefore, the production of Art was held to be desirable for its own sake. The idea was that the creation of beauty would in hope reflect images of a more desirable world, which would eventually guide us into bringing that world about.
  
  This lead to a new, unspoken self-propagating ideology transmitted through works of Art, which preached that
  
  1. The world as it is is ugly, flawed, and imperfect
  2. To make the world a better place, art should be consumed and created
  3. The pursuit of rational, utilitarian ends should be eschewed
  
  The problem is that this idea just doesn't work - looking at beautiful pictures all day will not solve our pressing moral problems.
  
  Rather than give up the fight, however, each successive generation of artists inevitably doubles down on their beliefs, leading to the whole history of modern art going deeper and deeper into the ugly, depressing, irrelevant, bizarre, etc. The previous generation of art didn't transform our forsaken world into an aesthetic utopia, therefore we need to go deeper into revealing the world itself as ugly and abhorrent, we need to go deeper into emphasizing the irrational... etc. Eventually leading to the baffling, ruinous state of contemporary art today.
  
  This is an interesting thesis to me. It seems very intuitive to me when looking at the contemporary art scene that This Is Not How It Should Be, that there is a sort of natural organic impulse in the human system to create art, but today's artists have deviated from it drastically, so drastically that almost everything that comes out of their mouth when they try to talk about art seems wrong, as if they are approaching the problem entirely the wrong way...
  
  This sense that we've left a healthy way of living and gone horribly wrong somehow naturally has us looking for a Fall, an erroneous historical decision to which we can give blame for the whole trajectory. It's easy to find these scapegoats - Marxism is a good one, non-representation is another, but what this book implies is that the Fall is synonymous with the invention of the concept Art itself. It truly is a Biblical narrative - it's man (as artist) becoming self-conscious which lead him to bite the apple of knowledge and be expelled from the garden.
  
  This means that any artist who may dream of restoring Art to its former glory is in an entirely wrong place - looking to Art for salvation makes you the problem in the first place.
• 
  DoctorM

  Nicely-crafted essays on the way we've defined "art" in the past couple of centuries and on what we've expected from art--- redemption, social change, social definition. Barzun is speaking to a general audience, and the collected essays here (originally given as lectures in the mis-1970s) are presented without illustrations, so there's a feeling here of being left without concrete examples, but Barzun's knowledge of art history is sweeping, and his ability to relate changes in how art is defined and used to changes in technology and its own social standing is unmatched.
• 
  Ске

  Absolutely marvelous, a must read!
• 
  Pieter

  The book includes a number of lectures by Mr Barzun to the National Galery (London) in which he shares his ideas about art. It is an intellectual voyage with lots of statements to overthink.
  
  The author cites Ruskin that a great nation produces great art. After all, all else passes, but art alone endures. It can shape the minds and emotions of men as well as enlarge their imagination. Great art thrills and helps to learn about oneself, the other and the world. Next to that, art cannot be divorced from moral and social significance. Art is not neutral and will thrive when there is a unity between state and religion since the latter helps emotions and symbols to converge. Art shows direction and embodies the divine. It is the gateway to the spirit, the enlargement of nature. To prove his point, Barzun quotes Hegel, Berlioz and Goethe who all confirm the interconnectivity between nature, religion and art.
  
  Since the age of science, protestantism and renaissance, the artist no longer preaches accepted morality, but claims its own "higher" morality. Art is no longer instrumental and illustrative to religion. Ruskin and Newman believe that religion can oppose materialism, positivism and the reduction of human life. But Nietzsche's transvaluation of values encouraged like Shaw and Ibsen to break with tradition. Barzun refers to an all male cast of the play "Trojan Women". Whereas the Romantics tried to imitate high art, other art movements simply led to decadence. Symbolism removes nature, is non-objective and reductive. Naturalism (Zola, Courbet) is obscene and urges rather to bruise than to bring catharsis. Functionalist architecture reduces buildings and houses to being functional, whereas architecture is typically multifunctional. T.S. Eliott once said that art is a simplification of life into something rich and strange. According to Barzun, minimal art is then just a short circuit. He sees similarities between modern art and science as both claim to be universal and eternal by using statistical, mathematical and abstract methods. E.g.: poetry has turned into a form of structure, but is no longer about literature and emotions. The standard is no longer the link to mankind or to imitate nature. No need to say that Mr Barzun regrets this trend in art.
• 
  P.S. Carrillo

  Thought provoking but at times difficult to follow, Barzun's massive intellect overwhelms. The book which consists of a series of lectures could have been dramatically enhanced by illustrations and images of the art styles referenced. Thankfully post modern art lacks so completely in imagination, it didn't make much difference when he was speaking to it. My takeaway from the book, very simply put is that a society's Art reflects back what is stirring in the collective consciousness. While the West was redefining itself after the fall of Rome with the new ideology of Christianity, Art thrived and had tremendous power. The Art of Europe (painting, architecture, poetry, drama) was Church mandated and paid for. An artist with talent could thrive throughout the centuries creating Art that was new and grand. The collective imagination of Europe was in a state of wonder and Man's relationship with the Universe was new territory to be explored. But with the death of God in the nineteenth century, all fascination with the transcendent died too. Man was now adrift as an isolated imperfect creature unloved and disposable to an indifferent Universe. What great Art could possibly come out of that? Barzun ends his last lecture on a hopeful note that somehow in the distant future, Man will find new inspiration to create new Art forms. I doubt it. The best of ourselves was shown to us by the great Masters of long ago. Modern Art can only reflect our pitiable state. Not much incentive to go gallery hopping.
• 
  Julie

  Moderately difficult read, but very much a classic! This author is clear and concise about how we use and abuse art and how art uses and abuses us, at times. Barzun is a comprehensive historian with years of experience in studying the zeitgeist of societies. In reading this book, I discovered my own definition of art, which will help me to understand what I like and do not like. I will read again and again.
• 
  Aaron Kent

  I have trouble digesting art criticism. Maybe some of the things talked about in this book will sink in and inform me. By the time that happens in the future, I will be unable to say whether or not they came from this book or from other mysterious sources....
• 
  Cristina

  For everyone who is an artist. Gives you a clear perspective of what Art is!
• 
  Sarah Dawn

  Really compelling and convincing