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Books

A Philosophy of Mass Art by Noel Carroll

Bob Sharpe considers art for the masses, the topic of a new book by Noel Carroll.

It often used to be said that there is no difference between high art and popular art, there is merely good and bad art. The suggestion was that this should be the governing distinction within the arts. If cinema is low or popular art, then The Third Man shows that the quality of popular art can easily surpass that of many of the products of high art. Gershwin wrote better music than Schoenberg and Graham Greene’s entertainments are superior to most of the serious fiction of Lawrence or Woolf. Professor Carroll calls the thesis that the only relevant difference is between good and bad art ‘eliminativism’ and he rejects it.

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