This cogently written book presents a forceful argument against an arts advocacy that is based on instrumentalist perspectives, and makes the case for supporting art on the basis of its fundamental role as a vehicle for the expression of creativity. Joli Jensen, professor of communication at the University of Tulsa, is ultimately interested in erasing the strict dichotomy between “high art” and “popular” or “mass culture” in favor of a more complex aesthetic and social point of view that encompasses all forms of art or creative production. The book, which reads like a long essay, is written in a clear and direct style that makes no bones about the anti-instrumentalist stance of its author. Its refreshing honesty and forthrightness require a solid argumentation, and Jensen delivers through a detailed examination and critique of the underpinnings of the instrumentalist position in social and art criticism through successive moments from the late nineteenth century to the present day. She contrasts instrumentalist positions and their consequences with what she posits as an alternative: a perspective that supports the expressive and fundamentally creative role of the arts as put forth in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and John E. Dewey.

Although Jensen brackets her analysis with Tocqueville and Dewey, she devotes most of the book to a careful tracing of the trends in art and social criticism that, while different in some respects, all adhere to the view that the arts are good for us because they can either redeem or transform us, and ultimately make us “better” citizens of a democracy. She roots these ideas in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writings of the poet and thinker Walt Whitman and the social critic and historian Lewis Mumford. Whitman envisioned a new art form, a transforming literature, emerging in America, one that would lead its citizens to fulfill the potential of democracy. Jensen argues that, in contrast to Tocqueville, Whitman did not see in his America the achievement of that democracy, but rather witnessed a populace still clinging to the aristocratic traditions of Europe. Jensen’s reading of Whitman’s essay “Democratic Vistas” may go against the grain of other scholars’ analyses, but it is convincing nonetheless. Similarly, she takes a second look at Mumford’s work, which is larger in scope and covers a longer time span than Whitman’s. In Mumford, Jensen finds a slightly different albeit equally instrumentalist view of the arts. Mumford perceives the arts as a “counterbalance” to the technological progression of modern society. In his view, modernity, with its attendant emphasis on “the machine,” posed a danger to the humane and must be offset with constant attention to the “living processes,” which include the production of the arts.

The redemptive, transforming, and counterbalancing functions of art staked out by Whitman and Mumford shaped much of the discussion in the art and social criticism, writings, and discourse of the twentieth century. Successive trends, as analyzed by Jensen, from conservative, liberal, and progressive perspectives, adopted aspects of their views and advocated for the arts on this basis. Jensen discusses major tendencies in the views of critics during the first three decades of the twentieth century, which she divides into four parts, espousing renewal, revolution, conservation, and avant-garde functions for the arts. Jensen discusses each of these in turn, but points out that, in the end, all subscribed to the view that art would uplift or transform a flawed populace in need of saving from malevolent social forces.

In the 1950s, critical discussion turned toward comparing art to mass culture, a notion that at the time was just emerging when mediums such as television, film, and radio expanded audiences and commodified art production on an unprecedented scale. The “culture industry” was transforming the artistic and social landscape of America, and critics and intellectuals reacted by making sharp distinctions between products of the mass culture and “true” art, which was authentic, good, and worthwhile. Jensen discusses writing that appeared in the Partisan Review and in Norman Jacob’s edited volume Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), a book that resulted from a symposium organized by the journal Daedalus in 1959. She then demonstrates the legacy of these debates in the present-day postmodernist privileging of the intellectual. Jensen singles out, albeit briefly, the way that so-called mass culture can only be legitimate in the eyes of the academy if it is first deconstructed or analyzed in the growing field of “cultural studies” that is pervading the humanities. Such treatment, she says, preserves the dichotomy between art and mass media based on functional distinctions and perpetuates a fundamentally elitist view of how people engage with art. A particularly nice aspect of Jensen’s analysis throughout is her reflection on how these early- and mid-twentieth-century writings are echoed in current discourses.

In chapter 4, Jensen finally turns her attention to contemporary debates about the role of art. Although the culture wars would seem to reflect diverging positions, Jensen demonstrates that underlying these was the common strain of Whitman and Mumford holding up the instrumentalist view of art. To quote Jensen:

Since the rise of modernism, the art-as-medicine perspective has been applied to all controversial new forms of art. The traditional fine arts are good for us, say conservatives, because they dispense essential, or time-honored, truths. New, difficult, upsetting works are also good for us, say radicals and progressives, because they challenge those truths. In this way, conservative, progressive, and radical positions on the arts share a definition of the arts as powerful (although in different ways) and beneficial (although for different reasons). (144)

Even when supporters of the National Endowment for the Arts advocate that arts could and should be broadened to include wider categories such as folk, ethnic, or community-based art, they maintain that art is a catalyst for social change. Art now, argue the intellectuals, is good for us because it contributes to economic revitalization, to building communities, to improved health, and to improved reading and math scores for students, as well as to the usual edification and uplift it provides. The real danger of this instrumentalist position, as Jensen sees it, is that it leads to contradictory and increasingly vague definitions of art and to a view that art can be a panacea for our social ills. This view obscures the need for substantive structural change necessary to address fully social inequities. Jensen is absolutely right on this point: improved health care, quality education, flourishing communities, and economic revitalization of impoverished neighborhoods will not result from increased arts funding, but rather from substantive processes of wealth redistribution and a commitment to empower citizens whose voices are too often left out of the policy decision-making. Trying to support the arts because they may play a role in this process will always be a weak cause, because there can never be adequate empirical evidence for the instrumental role of the arts in such complicated situations. For example, an ongoing effort by the Rand Corporation to pull together a synthesis of the existing research on the benefits of the arts is finding a high degree of variation in the studies and very mixed results.

So what are the arts good for, if they are not “good” for us? Jensen suggests we reexamine the writings of Dewey, the great philosopher and educator of the early decades of the twentieth century. Dewey, like Tocqueville, wrote of a different purpose for art—not uplift or transformation, but rather a more fundamental function: the expression of human creativity, rooted in people’s experience of everyday life and the world around them. Ultimately, Jensen locates Dewey’s perspective on the arts within his general approach to communication, a significant aspect of artistic experience. In effect, Dewey argues for a more holistic approach that sees the arts as a part of human endeavor, on par with scientific inquiry or other modes of expression. In this sense, the arts are not “good” for us but are a necessary and absolutely vital part of our lives. In Jensen’s view, adopting Dewey’s perspective on the arts does not entail the suspension of judgments of quality, but it does require eschewing false dichotomies among high art, low art, and mass or popular culture.

It is this part of the book that strongly resonates with a new understanding of arts practice emerging from anthropological and social-science studies. Research I recently conducted in Chicago on men and women creating art in non-art settings (for example, people singing in choirs, playing music on the street, quilting in the park, writing in libraries, or performing poetry and spoken word in coffee houses) reinforces Jensen’s contention that the meaningfulness of art does not stem from its contribution to preconceived notions of personal or societal change, but rather from the hope it holds out to people that they can remain creative and expressive individuals in an increasingly alienated and fragmented world. The social impact of the arts, it appears, is more widespread than previously imagined (recent research in Philadelphia by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert for the Social Impact of the Arts Project makes this point as well; see www.sp2.upenn.edu/SIAP), but its power is not as medicine but instead as an essential element in the struggle to maintain humanity. Dewey understood this, and Jensen’s evocation of his perspective seems to be coming at just the right time. Her analysis is fascinating, and one only wishes she had elaborated more on its implications for the study of contemporary trends in communicative practices. Jensen skims the surface of what these might be and seems to stop short of the logical follow-through to her critique of the instrumentalist position.

The integration of social criticism or analysis of artistic practice and communicative practices offers innovative and fresh insights and holds out a promise for a new direction in arts policy. This is urgently needed at a time when conservative critics such as George Will, Lynne Cheney, and Senator Joseph Lieberman are once again powerfully advocating for elitist and narrow positions on the definition of art and who is entitled access to it. Jensen will, we hope, explore these themes more fully in future work. But for now, this book should be required reading for those in the spheres of cultural-policy work and social criticism. Its clear and compelling message should be heeded by all of us who care about art, creativity, and democracy.