art as amusement

R.G. Collingwood on art as amusement

Is it true that art is principally valuable as a source of pleasure and enjoyment? It is worth noting that it is not always natural to speak of 'enjoying' art. People quite easily say this of novels, plays, films and pieces of music, but less easily of paintings, sculptures and buildings. So even if it were agreed that 'enjoyment' often explains the value of art, some further explanation of just what this might mean in the case of the plastic arts and architecture would be needed.

But a more important difficulty is this. To say that art is something we enjoy, tells us next to nothing. People enjoy lots of things - their work, their holidays, their food. When someone says he enjoys his work, we usually ask what it is about the work that is enjoyable, and expect his answer to tell us about what he finds of value in it. 'Enjoyment' does no more than signal that he values it. In a similar fashion, the initial claim that art is a source of enjoyment is not in itself informative. It simply leads on to the next question. What makes it enjoyable?

It is often assumed (as Hume assumes) that the answer is obvious; things are enjoyable because they give us pleasure. Now the concept of 'pleasure' also needs some clarification, because it can be used in such a general fashion that it means little more than 'enjoyment' in the sense just described, in which case we are no further forward. But getting clear about the concept of pleasure is not as easy as we might suppose. There is a tendency to conflate 'pleasure' with 'happiness' as though they were synonymous, when they are not, and another tendency to think of 'pleasure' as the psychological opposite of 'pain'. Both these tendencies are to be found in the founders of philosophical utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73), and since utilitarian ideas have had such a powerful influence on contemporary culture, these tendencies have become widespread.

The sense of 'pleasure' we want to examine here is something like 'entertainment value'. The value of art is that it offers us entertainment. This is a thesis that the British Philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) discusses in The Principles of Art, one of the major works of aesthetics published in the twentieth century and one to which we will have occasion to return in a later chapter. Collingwood calls the belief that the value of art lies in its ability to entertain us, 'art as amusement'. While he is partly engaged in the traditional task of philosophical aesthetics - namely defining what art is - his interest is a normative one. The purpose of his book is to arrive at a satisfactory conception of 'art proper' or true art, as we might say, and what he wants to show is that 'art as amusement' falls short of 'art proper'. Confusing the two hides an important mistake.

Collingwood does not mean to deny that there are people for whom the arts are a form of entertainment, and it may indeed be the case that, as a matter of fact, they genuinely find amusement in plays, novels, and so on. This is an important point to stress. To claim that 'art as amusement' falls short of 'art proper' does not require us to deny that the arts have recreational value and can entertain us. Collingwood's contention is that if this is all we find there; we have missed the thing most worth finding. His analysis of the error in 'art as amusement' is both insightful and persuasive, but best considered in connection with his own, positive theory of art which will be examined in Chapter 3. At this point in the argument, it is sufficient to register a doubt he raises about an important assumption at work. The thesis that art is valuable for the pleasure or amusement we derive from it depends, crucially, on the truth of a factual claim - that we do indeed derive pleasure from it.

Is this actually true? What is at issue here is not a matter of language or belief, but a matter of experience. First, people readily use the language of pleasure and enjoyment in connection with the arts, but it does not follow that the thing they experience is properly called 'pleasure'. Second, for all sorts of reasons people will claim that they enjoy major novels, great masters, the music of the concert hall, and may make this claim quite sincerely. But what they choose to do is often a more convincing test of their real opinion than what they feel constrained to say. Once we shift our attention to the choices they make, it is not at all obvious that most people find most of what we call art pleasurable in any straightforward sense.

Someone who wants to read simply for pleasure is far more likely to choose a novel by John Grisham than by William Faulkner, though the label 'literature' would be attached to the latter rather than the former. Romantic comedy is a more obvious choice than art film for most people going to the cinema, just for pleasure. Channel hoppers wanting an evening's entertainment at home are, by and large, more likely to stop at soap opera than Shakespeare. And who, apart from a very few, would prefer the art gallery to the restaurant if what is in view is simply pleasure?

Such preferences need not prevail universally for the general point to hold; great novels can also be diverting and amusing. But there is this further point to be emphasized. People who, for the purposes of entertainment, choose soap opera over Shakespeare or Grisham over Faulkner, are most unlikely to claim that what they have chosen is artistically more valuable or significant. Probably, they will agree that Faulkner is a far more important writer than Grisham. Even so, his novels provide a much less pleasurable way of passing the time. In the same way 'easy listening' is preferable to Beethoven's late Quartets, because it is easy, not because it is greater art.

The fact that personal pleasure and artistic significance can be divorced in this way lends support to Collingwood's contention that the prevalence of 'art as amusement' as the explanation of aesthetic value has distorted people's ability to ask honestly just how much pleasure they derive from 'high' art. Collingwood thinks that there is often a measure of self-deception in people's attitudes, because there is often a conventional pressure to claim to enjoy art. But if we are honest most of us will admit that the entertainment value of high art is quite low compared to other amusements.

The masses of cinema goers and magazine readers cannot be elevated by offering them . . . the aristocratic amusements of a past age. This is called bringing art to the people, but that is clap-trap; what is brought is still amusement, very cleverly designed by a Shakespeare or a Purcell to please an Elizabethan or a Restoration audience, but now, for all its genius, far less amusing than Mickey Mouse or jazz, except to people laboriously trained to enjoy it.

Collingwood's judgement on (his) contemporary culture may sound harsh, but he draws our attention to a point of some substance. Forms of entertainment have become more sophisticated over the centuries. What would have amused the 'yokels' in the pit at Shakespeare's Globe theatre must seem a very poor form of entertainment to a generation reared on television programmes like Fawlty Towers, Friends and Blackadder. These are far funnier than the comic scenes in Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it is only a dogmatic commitment to the belief that great art gives great pleasure that could lead us to deny it.

In any case, there is this further objection. Even if we were to agree, contrary to what has been said, that art can be relied upon to amuse, this would not give us any special reason to value or pursue it. There are many other cheaper and less taxing forms of amusement - card games, picnics, crossword puzzles, computer games, for example. If simple pleasure is what is at issue, on the surface at any rate, art is at best only a contender for value, and in all probability a rather weak one.