As World War II loomed in 1939, reports British literary man John Carey in his badly reasoned thought-balloon on the arts, the trustees of Britain's National Gallery "decided that the whole collection should be sent to Canada."

Churchill, according to Carey, intervened to modify the plan and have the pictures "moved to slate mines in Wales." Carey adds: "Civilian populations could not, of course, be provided with comparable protection and were killed in large numbers."

Only two paragraphs later, however, Carey asserts that the trustees, headed by Kenneth Clark of later Civilisation fame, considered the artworks "precious and sacred, and more worth preserving when it came to the crunch, than human life."

It's a ludicrous, unsupported charge against those trustees, completely vicious and illogical: Carey infers from his own admission that civilians "could not... be provided with comparable protection" the outré judgment that Clark and company valued paintings over people.

Carey's slapdash non sequiturs, which fuel both his Pirandellian "It is so, if I think so" style of argument, and his ressentiment about elitist privilege in What Good Are the Arts?, make you fear he might say "Yes."

The answer, in the case of this confused effort by Carey to do rigorous aesthetics, is "Not much" - at least if you think about the topic as screwily as he does.

Chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times of London and famously tough in his verdicts, Carey begins in high curmudgeonly mode, citing over-the-top paeans to the arts by Western thinkers since the 18th century.

The arts, we've been told, constitute "the visible appearance of God's kingdom on earth," "inspire love in the highest part of the soul," and "mitigate the savagery of mere desires."

All mostly rot, opines Carey. The whole notion of the arts as "sacred," he explains, "implies that their value is absolute and universal," a claim he rejects. Much of his effort thus aims at putting all the arts - except literature - back in their humble place by addressing classic aesthetic questions such as: "What is a work of art?"; "Is 'high art' superior?"; and "Do the arts make us better?"

For more than three decades, Danto, a philosopher, has consistently argued that the revolution in the idea of art sparked by Duchamp and Warhol - both of whom presented ordinary objects (e.g., Duchamp's urinal, Warhol's Brillo boxes) to the world as artworks - made us see that artworks are best understood as objects with the quality of "aboutness," which requires interpretation.

Danto took pains over the years to distinguish his position from the "institutional theory of art," associated with aesthetician George Dickie. The latter theory held, in simple form, that a work of art is anything the "art world" (i.e., museums, collectors, highfalutin critics) deems to be art or a "candidate for appreciation." That theory offends Carey's populist sensibilities. So, ignoring all but one of Danto's books since his 25-year-old The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (in which Danto also made clear his rejection of the institutional theory), Carey hangs the theory around Danto's neck and sets out to counter it.

Carey's argument is both simple and simplistic. Modern artists present almost everything imaginable as art: feces, empty space, cosmetic surgery, their own frozen blood, "arbitrarily scrambled sentences." A theory of art, Carey consequently believes, must be true of each of those presentations in a strictly mathematical sense - true of the whole set of asserted artworks.

As a result, Carey reaches the following definition: "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that person."

"Justifiable homicide is anything that anyone has ever considered an act of justifiable homicide, though it may be justifiable homicide only for that person."

In the real world, analysts of a concept begin by accepting that not everything remotely perpetrated in a concept's name counts as evidence to be considered.

But Carey plunges further into cloud-cuckoo-land. To him, the "old use of 'work of art' as a term of commendation, implying membership of an exclusive category," is now "obsolete," as "intellectually respectable as a belief in pixies." He also announces that the non-existence of God (his premise), added to our inability to access other minds, prevents us "from pronouncing other people's judgments right or wrong." (Of course, Carey, with typical inconsistency, does just that throughout the book.) As a result, all "artistic judgment comes down to how people feel."

Despite these coruscating feats of deduction, Carey condescends throughout his book to many who, time and reputation suggest, reason more subtly than he does.

Kant's Critique of Judgment is a "farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion." (That must explain why it's the most influential text in the history of philosophical aesthetics.) John Dewey's definition of a work of art is "worthless" (though perhaps not to the millions of children introduced to active artistry in its name).

Walter Benjamin "draws his evidence exclusively from his imagination." Theodor Adorno's theories of art "bear no relation to any ascertainable facts."

The derision goes on and on. At the same time, Carey relentlessly issues flat-wrong generalizations. After a century in which everyone from quaint Gilbert Seldes to sainted Susan Sontag to peripatetic Umberto Eco exploded the critical deprecation popular art once suffered in comparison with high art, Carey observes that "cultural commentators distinguish 'high' art... from mass or popular art, and generally assume its superiority."

Finally, though Carey rebukes critics early in his book for using "we" instead of "I," he regularly violates his individualistic credo through other linguistic flimflams, as when he savages a passage from 19th-century writer Charles Kingsley: "To the modern reader this is plainly sickening cant."

Given such repeated sloppiness, it's no shock that Carey's closing section and argument - that literature alone permits reasoning to take place, and thus stands as the paramount art - is as unconvincing as his earlier claims.

First, What Good Are the Arts? abounds with entertaining snippets from a mind well-steeped in anecdotes and one-liners from the history of art. It's fun to recall that Aristotle found flute music "too exciting," that Andre Breton cited shooting a revolver at random in a crowd as the quintessential Surrealist act, that William James remarked of alcohol: "[T]o the poor and unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature."

Second, What Good Are the Arts?, like Headline News, spotlights multiple issues we (apologies) should ponder, from the apt use of public money to support the arts, to Carey's judgment, apropos of his title question, that "the widely shared belief that art can instruct the public, and help to attain a better state of affairs, lacks any factual basis."

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