Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

by Jed Perl

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts--musical, literary, and visual--and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us.

As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. "Art's relevance," he writes, "has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance." Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings--wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture.

Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable--that's the key to its importance. Taking his stand with artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation--the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium--that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we're experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it's the interplay between authority and freedom--what Perl calls "the lifeblood of the arts"--that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Criticism, Essays, Writing, Literary Criticism

176 pages, Hardcover

Published January 11, 2022

Reviews

[Mary Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perl's essential thesis that art must exist at the intersection of authority and freedom, between the requirements of production and the inciting passions of expression, is fine because it's an old idea. So instead we have to turn our attention to the reason that Perl has resurrected this old idea. What significance does this have for us now, exactly?

Well, Perl is effusive on this point. He wants to defend the arts, but he's too much of a coward to place any particular blame. The closest we get in this book is something like this: "When we rush to label them—as radical, conservative, liberal, gay, straight, feminist, Black, or white—we may describe a part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value. And without that the arts are nothing."

So we are against constraning artworks in any sort of external ideology, and should instead look at their intrinsic freestanding value. But what is that freestanding value? By way of explaining, Perl tends to focus on those artworks that transcend the particular circumstances of their creation. He believes that those artworks that we consider "great" now have some kernel within them that allowed this transcendence.

I was most struck by Perl's lack of curiosity about how these narratives of greatness are formed. He seems to think that they are natural, even inevitable, but I disagree. The canon of any art form has to be constructed. The works of art that were considered great hundreds of years ago are not necessarily the ones that will be considered great today, and likewise, the works of art we deem great today may not be considered great hundreds of years in the future. Greatness is a relative value, not an immovable principle, and values change, so the idea that they must all contain the same kernel of greatness is simply not true.

It is not a mistake that the majority of Perl's examples of artistic greatness are titans of the Western canon. Their greatness has been constructed by generations of patrons, audiences, critics, funding boards, and scholars before him and handed to Perl on a silver platter, but he has not bothered to examine how the sausage gets made.

Perl's disinterested aesthetics is founded on what he sees as our present moment of freedom, but that moment is not as free as he is pretending. I am struck by this passage:

"If now, more than a generation later, I find myself called upon to try to explain why the arts matter, it certainly isn’t because I’m living in a country where there is a threat of anything resembling the Nazi book burnings, Stalinist gulags, or mass murders and reeducation programs that the Maoists encouraged in the name of the Cultural Revolution. People in many parts of the world still risk their lives and their freedom when they embrace certain ideas about the value of art, but such dangers do not exist in the United States, where I live, or in most of Western Europe, or in some other parts of the world."

In a period of nearly unprecedented censorship of LGBT books, banning of drag performances, attacks on scholarship of critical race theory, silencing of academic freedom, and the list goes on, I'm shocked that he can think this way. Get your head out of your ass, Jed. Look around you.

This book is a failure because Perl is unwilling to address how "freestanding value" is constructed. He is not willing to examine how the new calls of the arts to be socially responsive are not refusals of arts' value, but actions made towards the construction of a new artistic value. Finally, because he is not willing to examine why that is necessary in the first place, the book will swiftly become irrelevant.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr. Perl has a decent point that art of all kinds inherently sits on the border between authority and freedom. It has to have some kind of structure and dwell in some sort of cultural context to make any sense. That's the authority part. It also has to dare to break at least a few of the rules and go at least a short way outside of the box to be interesting and worthy of being considered art. That's the freedom part, but if it goes too far, if it exhibits too much freedom, it loses audience and becomes harder for us to relate to it. The best parties are the ones where there are some old friends, but also some new people, and so it is with a good book or painting or piece of music.

But Mr. Perl unfortunately flogs this one point again and again. Long after the horse is dead, he continues to beat it. You'd think that wouldn't be a problem in a book this short, but it could have been half as long or less without losing anything.

My other gripe is Mr. Perl's discussion of the question of art serving society. He quotes Trotsky as saying that art cannot be removed from its social context, but he rejects the Trotskyite perspective and goes on say that art must only be judged on the basis of artistic criteria, not its role in social issues. But that's just wrong. And it's inconsistent with Mr. Perl's main point about how good art sits on the edge between authority and freedom. There's a social aspect of that dichotomy that Mr. Perl completely misses - Trotsky had it more right than Perl. The contrast between authority and freedom in social matters is expressed in art just as much as it is expressed in choices about form and structure. Of course there is bad art that may be famous and influential for social reasons but that fails as art - "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Chernyshevsky's "What is to be Done" come to mind, but it doesn't have to be that way. Ai Wei Wei, who is a terrific artist, whose works are beautiful, daring, moving and artistically original, are also deeply connected to social issues, so that he says in his memoir that his, art and his activism are part of a seamless whole that cannot be understood or even exist in isolation from one another.

[Jeffrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

A rare 1-star from me, but this book is dangerous and deserves all the scorn heaped upon it that I already see in the reviews here on Goodreads. It is dangerous not because it challenges the status quo or forces us to confront difficult ideas. It is dangerous because its entire thesis is to denude art of its symbolic, political, and phenomenological force. It wants to reduce art to the isolated, abstracted fancies of a so-called genius, severed from the messy, embedded life of the world in which it actually emerges.

This is not art. This is the neoliberal fantasy of pure abstraction. It is an unconscious, purely operationalized efficiency. It is the ideal of the expedient individual, free of obligation, history, or context. Which is to say, it is not art at all.

I could go on, but I just finished writing an essay on what it means for art, and music specifically, to sound us into being - as a people, as a community, as a nation. Kieslowski’s Blue makes this clear. Just read that to get a sense of why this book is 100% garbage.

[pugs · Rating 2 out of 5]

i get what perl is doing, even intrigued by his criticism of marxist interpretation of art, along with trotsky’s viewpoint. but the bludgeoning of freedom vs form vs authority vs the unstructured vs the visceral reaction became tedious (the point i suppose), which wouldn’t have bothered me if he branched out to perhaps the lesser known, or the radical lost to time. overall, this felt too safe; questioning art under say 20th century fascism has been done enough, and it takes more guts to criticize art under u.s. empire, but that’s also where perl can make his money, so the analysis in this book comes off plain, soft, again, safe. i’ve even found his later “get off my lawn” type of articles more thought provoking, and would have taken that over this. held my attention a bit, but prob not worth your time. or i’m just too lowbrow.

[Hannah Mosley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite quote from the book:
"if the art is the ordering of disordering experience, then the artist must be true both to the order and the disorder..."

[Martin Mugar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saturday, February 5, 2022
"Authority and Freedom" by Jed Perl

In his latest book “Authority and Freedom”, Perl establishes a paradigm that spells out a healthy antidote to the purpose for which art is currently practiced in our culture. He sees it as a paradigm that has always existed even as far back as the work of Egyptian artisans millennia ago where the hand of the craftsman can set itself off from the strict story telling of the hieroglyphs. In the Middle Ages artisans told stories in paint, glass and sculpture from the Bible but let come into play their own fantasies of what took place in the biblical story book. Hence: Authority and Freedom. The church embodies on the one hand the notion of authority, the traditionalist base that dictates how one should proceed as artists according to the parabolic story line of the Bible. On the other hand fears of sacrilege did not hinder the freedom to play of the artisan who pushes against the limits of the authorization. According to Perl priests would take notice of these deviations from the tradition but I suppose once something is written in stone as it were it is hard to excise. They live on untouched to this day. The choice of the word authority seemed awkward to me at first glance as cognates such as authoritarian come to mind and must be explained away as not being what Perl intends. The meaning of authority Perl wishes to work for him is borrowed from his readings of the writings of the philosopher Hanna Arendt in particular ”What is Authority” for whom the word has more in common with the latin word augere meaning augment. Authenticity is another cognate that unlike authoritarian is closer to Perl’s intent.



The book is built out of many examples from the history of art, music and poetry among other artistic domains to elucidate the dynamic between authority and freedom. If you look up the usage of authority in the dictionary it tends toward imposition of dogma to be accepted due to its, legal validity, gravity and authenticity. In a religious realm it is a passage of scripture that settles argument. In the hands of an individual, it represents the power to reinforce or convince people through a command. In fact, many of the examples of authority that Perl provides for the most part seem to grow out of the spiritual realm. His description of a memorable rendition of Amazing Grace by Aretha Franklin points to the roots of her popular music in the heart of the black Southern Baptist Church. Gospel becomes the authority for the breakaway of her career into the realm of pop. But this breakout can at times be a breakdown as in the poetry of T.S. Eliot’s the “Waste Land” where the spirituality of the past is seen to dissolve and fragment no longer providing the pillars of wisdom that so forcefully shaped Western Culture.



The dichotomy of Authority and Freedom can take place historically from one cultural artifact to the next but can take place within the work of the individual artist’s career. Perl points out that the classicism of Michelangelo’s early work becomes blatantly Baroque later in life as it breaks down the classical canons that other Renaissance artists followed. It can be seen as well as a harbinger of the Baroque that followed the Renaissance.



Authority has a numinous almost prophetic aspect to it in the hands of Perl. It is a source of clarity and insight that tries to organize the world harmoniously. It devolves into the secular but out of that movement art happens. The individual is the agent of this evolution. The aforementioned Medieval craftsmen sneak their opinions and play it into their sculpture and painting but in the case of Mozart and Beethoven there is a battle between them and the aristocracy that in the day owned their musicians. Both wanted to be respected as creative forces in their own right. I recall an anecdote of Beethoven and Goethe taking a walk in the countryside around Vienna when they encounter an important Hapsburg to whom out of deference Goethe instinctively bowed. Beethoven according to the story trudged right past him and said: “He should be bowing to me.” Mozart also tried to establish himself as a commercial success beyond the patronage of the aristocracy. He wanted to be his own authority in breaking away from societal authority where they were in many ways no more important than valets The notion of genius cannot be ignored as the center of gravity that establishes these shifts in authority from the aristocratic overlords to the creative individual. The world would then submit to an authority built out of force of genius. What an exciting dynamically charged interaction! It is the birth of modernity.



These transfers of power,not to diminish the validity of the event in the work itself where this battle takes place are societal events. The most recent societal shift is the ongoing dissolution of the Beethovian individual that thrusted itself into richer and deeper and more powerful notions of self-hood, by the Marxist-Leninist belief that the individual only has an identity by being part of the societal whole. The battle of Beethoven to assert his individuality in the context of aristocratic sponsors participates in the larger societal struggle against the kings and queens that had shaped the world through the 19thc with one violent revolution after another culminating in the Russian Revolution at the beginning of the 20thc. Power was handed down from one generation of royalty to the next and over time the European aristocracy intermarried to create a superstructure that exists in part to this day. Beethoven was a radical, who looked to Napoleon to break down the established order, freeing the individual to create their own story. This is an incredibly dynamic storybook. But what happens when you are told that the state, which represents the newly liberated masses, cannot be criticized or that the individual’s life has no private meaning only a political one.



Any attempt to see the individual as separate from the state and other than as a manifestation of liberation of the masses is suspect and treasonous. To ignore this is referred to as “false consciousness”. That is: your very being is suspect if you don’t see how oppression is built into the capitalist system of which you are a part. In the Soviet Union gulags were set up to cure individuals of this false consciousness and a paltry yet courageous few such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were able to reach out to the West with stories of the how horrible the oppression was in the USSR. Shostakovich’s music embodies the anxiety of existing in this authoritarian world where one’s loyalty to the cause of the worker is always under scrutiny.



Perl ends his book with a a story about W.H. Auden’s famous eulogy to W.B. Yeats. It embodies the essence of the Authority/ Freedom interplay. There appeared around the same time several essays by Auden about Yeats who in the 30’s showed sympathy for the European fascists. In the eulogy Auden charitably saw this as a sort of silliness and a sentimentality for the old aristocracy that Yeats admired and from whom he received patronage. In the end Yeats’s poems are well wrought and to this day resonate with the general public and therefore can be seen as democratic. He excercised his freedom to be a maker of poems even if when it came to his “doing” in the world of politics he failed miserably with his allegiances. (Perl distinguishes the making of the poem over which the poet has absolute control with the doing of politics where mistakes can be made in a world that is often beyond our control.) What seems to be missing in this description of Yeats is his theosophical interests. They seem to be the authority by which he gives gravity to his language. He will apply it, so it seems, through magical incantations. Although I can find no proof the lines “The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun” taken from the “The Song of Wandering Aengus” seems to have some source in a magical symbolic incantation .They to this day have a feel of the mysterious in them. Ray Bradbury named a collection of his short stories “Golden Apples of the Sun” and said his wife had introduced him to Yeats and these words had the same effect on him as they do on me. Could this be the authority hidden in Yeats’s work? The spiritual authority he attributes to Aretha Franklin from her Southern Baptist gospel roots. In lesser hands of not a great maker of poems, the influence of theosophy could be stultifying as Flannery O’Connor commented about a very catholic novel she was told to read and admire by a catholic priest, whose dogma was correct but whose story was badly told.



I had a strangely pertinent face to face interaction with Auden in 1970. He came to dinner with the Scholars of the House at Yale, a group I was part of whose members were allowed to work on independent projects during their senior year. I was an admirer of Yeats and must have known at the time about the Eulogy he wrote for him. I asked him after dinner what he thought of Yeats. He responded very adamantly that he was a fascist. And left it at that. How did Ed Mendelson his biographer who accompanied him to the dinner react? Auden passed away the following year. Did he no longer have the same tolerance for Yeats’s politics? Did it finally seem to matter that he supported fascists? A classmate Joe Knight who studied English Literature at Yale and Harvard said there is evidence that Auden was extremely jealous of Yeats’s talents. At the end of his life did the wrong politics gave Auden the possibility of cancelling Yeats’s greatness as a poet. It suggests that behind the concern for art being politically correct is the illness that Nietzsche said awaited our culture as a whole: the waste land grows: Resentment or “Ressentiment” as he used it is the deeply sour well out from which we channel art into predetermined realms of activity. Perl's new book is its diagnosis.


















Labels: Aretha Franklin, Beethoven, Flannery O'Connor, Goethe, Hapsburgs, Karl Marx, Mozart, Ray Bradbury, Shostakovich, Solzhenitsyn, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeat

[sanni · Rating 2 out of 5]

i saw this in a little free library and grabbed it because a book about art by an older white guy is no offense but not something i’m typically interested in reading but i decided to branch out a little and participate in the free marketplace of ideas.

i went into this pretty eager to enjoy it. i thought describing the constraints of artistic medium and the act of creating beyond these constraints as a push/pull between authority and freedom was interesting. also found perl’s effusive love of the art and artists he’s enjoyed throughout his life to be charming.

the book overall tho was… not good… i thought the idea that the production of art exists outside of other social, economic, and political forces was kind of absurd lol like that is just patently untrue (sure there are aspects of the arts and people’s engagement with them that i guess u could say exist beyond that but i dont know… i feel like artistic PRODUCTION itself is definitely very tied up in those things…) i feel like it reflected an extremely shallow view of the role that these forces play in honestly all forms of production. such a shallow view that i was pretty shocked that someone who seems to be a pretty successful art critic holds that view!

also i fucking hated the way it was written. i felt that in some chapters perl would just string together quote after quote from some artist or thinker or another without engaging with the quotes he was using themselves or providing context for why he was interested in engaging with this specific person’s thoughts?

like in one section he heavily quoted katherine anne porter’s writing on virginia woolf. i was automatically pretty interested given that i read and enjoyed something by porter pretty recently. but reading the way the quotes were used i was just like “ok and…?” like even as someone who went into that section with interest i wasn’t particularly convinced that quoting porter added anything to the work. if i’d gone in without having an interest in and previous engagement with her work i would have probably felt even more that way.

the whole thing kind of made me think like “ok who is this for??” like it’s not a particularly academic or rigorous feeling book? but it i guess like presupposes that readers should be deeply familiar with why these specific artists/thinkers quoted by perl are being treated as THE authorities on the subjects they’re quoted on? idk…….

[Ian Pierce · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does a fine job defending its point that art must exist where authority and freedom mingle. It was just exhausting in its repetitive method of analysis and fails to get past its relatively uncontroversial thesis to say much interesting about art. I guess his thoughts about art existing sort of outside of time/place/society was interesting but the actual defense of this point wasn’t particularly convincing to me.

[Anson Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, one of his main arguments is that authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts. In other words, in order to make a valuable art-piece, an artist must fully embrace the traditional roots, which can be interpreted as authority, first, and then use his or her imaginative freedom. Noteworthy, as for the meaning of authority, Perl is not entirely negative at all, rather he actually views it as the very basic foundation of artworks. Furthermore, he stresses out that the very concept of both freedom and authority has always been remediated by artists so that they can actually utilize this sort of tension to dramatize the power of artwork to a further degree. To illustrate this point, he uses a rich selection of examples in various fields like music, painting, or even architecture outlining the coexistence of authority and freedom in the art world. Personally, I think the rich selection of examples, especially comparing anecdotes among different periods of time, is one of the biggest strengths of his book. Yet, some of his arguments in this book I personally find rather mediocre. For example, in chapter 1, he precisely states that, “I’m inclined to go further and argue that in all times and places the creative act has involved a struggle, debate, or dialogue between authority and freedom”(11). To me, as far as I was reading chapter 1 (before diving into the historical and philosophical explanation apropos of this point), although I like the way he describes the uniqueness of each artwork or “the enigma of the work itself” as he explains, which was made by the encounter of authority and freedom across different periods of time, it seems a bit redundant for the author to use all his personal experiences to illustrate this point, as the power of reality definitely has shaped the creation of artwork somehow. Another argument I could not agree with in his book, particularly in chapter 2, is that he talks about the uniqueness of the vocation as being an artist. Basically, rather than doing work like other mundane daily tasks, artists are the ones making things happen. Noteworthy, the author stresses out the difference between doing and making multiple times in this book to conclude that in order to create a valuable artwork in their native territory , artists must be somehow pious to or fully indulged in their vocation. To me, thinking about artworks created nowadays, I feel like artists need to have some sort of mission to address or reflect the issues we encounter in our daily lives in their artworks. Moreover, at some point, he states that, “An artist brings to these traditions many personal inclinations and dispositions, but the act of painting, writing, composing, music-making, or dancing sets everything that is personal within a larger context”. From these sentences, I found it somehow paradoxical as personal inclinations and dispositions the author describes here are definitely shaped by social, economic surroundings teh artist is living in, then wouldn’t we say the creative act itself was actually taken place in non-native territory? Again, going back to the discussion about vocation, I do think that author could have elaborated more on the relationship between artistic vocation and religious vocation as he spends large amounts of time demonstrating the struggles artists in different periods of time bumped into during the creation of catholic artworks like paintings and architecture designs. Additionally, I highly recommend that the use of visual illustrations like the photos of Michelangelo’s laurentian library and illuminated manuscripts could help readers (especially those who may not be familiar with art history that well) grasp the point the author is trying to make in a better sense.

Yet, there are several arguments I found really interesting in his book. For example, he mentions that the competition between freedom and authority we usually see in any artwork is actually a cyclic process. Specifically, when certain ways of making things gradually become guidelines or authority later on, the act of artists seeking freedom from the existed ground becomes new forms of authority in a sense. Therefore, it is a constant search process for “the new forms of authority or new sources of authority”, as Perl puts it. Another point is about the dynamic relationship between authority and freedom he demonstrates in chapter 4 and chapter 5. Specifically, he views “the patterns of authority and freedom” as “the patterns of limitedness and limitlessness”. And I found it highly interesting as he somehow points to some kinds of “bad art” (allegedly being innovative) we saw frequently in daily life, yet lacking artistic traditional roots.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The TV Character Ron Swanson once said 'Never half ass two things. Whole ass one thing'. Art, Perl argues, is about whole assing one thing - art in and for itself. It's techniques and foundations. Its history and traditions. Its forms and finding, forcing and fighting for genuine creativity and freedom within those constraints.

If art can serve additional goals, such as social or political commentary, that is to its benefit. But to set out with that as the purpose of art is to half ass two things. Either by degrading the power of art, or by pursuing a means of political change which we know to be almost entirely ineffective.

Perl's concern may be with the desire of many contemporary artists to be activists, but he is not so crude (or perhaps brave) as to directly attack. Instead, he builds his case through an exploration of the purpose and nature of art. In particular, the paradoxical relationship between authority and freedom. The painter's square canvas, the need to master the tools, the legacy and context of a vocation all impose a form of authority. True freedom, real freedom, emerges in the struggle to both work within these constraints and yet produce something that excels.

At heart, Perl wants to restore a place for art as a free-flowing part of society, one that has its power because it is apart from time and place, and has the power to pull us out of our particular context. To feel and intuit the deeper senses of the world. "Art is a lie that makes us realise truth" as Picasso said. Therein is its power, to be for and in-itself, in a way denied to almost everything else in our hyper-utilitarian world. Where in life we 'do', in art we 'make' Perl argues.

This paradoxical tension is a powerful way to understand the creative act. Making requires both authority - in the sense of foundations, expertise, techniques, limitations, history and responsibility - and freedom - to reshape meaning, to view anew, to challenge, and push boundaries, and find forms that are valuable. Often we ask if Strategy is an 'art' or 'science', meaning creative and structured. The more I learn about art and science, the more absurd that distinction seems to become. Science is a fundamentally creative act, art is fundamentally about foundations. Authority and freedom need each other, and to abandon one is generally an act for attention, not creation.

As noted above, Perl comes at his target somewhat obliquely. You'd want some background in the various debates about modern art to understand some of the references or critiques he offers. Personally, with my own engagement with the Atelier school, I am generally supportive of his view, even if i think politics suffuses the act of art more than Perl lets on. This is a long essay more than a book, and you'd get most of the general themes with a subscription to the New York Review of Books (where I first saw it reviewed), but a thoughtful and compelling little mediation none the less.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some gems of insight in this book. For instance:

"Just about anything that's been felt or thought can fuel a work of art: hopes, dreams, passions, beliefs, predilections, uncertainties, fears, even prejudices. There are many other areas of human experience and endeavor where these same forces are in play. But life in a civil society nearly always demands compromises and accommodations. We adjust our most ardent ideas and emotions as we reach for consensus. Creative spirits, although by no means immune to the social and political forces that shape their time, aren't consensus builders--at least not in any direct way. Because the work that artists do is detached from what we think of as ordinary human activity and action--because they are making things rather than doing things--they're able to reimagine our ideas and experiences in an intensified, concentrated, hyperbolic form. There's a sense in which all creative spirits are extremists. That helps explain why for centuries popes and princes were so interested in cultivating the work of painters, sculptors, authors, and composers. They recognized the unique, perhaps otherworldly impact of these achievements that stand apart from life's compromises, conflicts, and intrigues. A statue or poem honoring a god or a hero, precisely because it's immune to life's ordinary pressures, con have an impact unlike anything else on earth." pgs 72-73

"Because the arts are a process that stands apart from so much of our social, economic, and political life they move us and excite us unlike anything else in our lives. When we rush to label them--as radical, conservative, liberal, gay, straight, feminist, Black or white--we may describe a part of what they are, but we've failed to account for their freestanding value. pg 145

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book, based on its summary in Amazon: "As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. The summary is accurate. Perl presented his argument in a careful and straightforward manner, making a solid case for the following ideas: 1) Authority in art is rooted in its traditions, 2) the freedom of the artist is found in taking those traditions and reimagining them, and 3) artists should not be expected to create with a political or social message in mind, nor should art be judged based solely on its message. He used a broad definition for the word artist, including filmmakers, painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and others. He used multiple examples from all of these media to support his arguments.

While I agreed with Perl on many points, I was disappointed that he did not go deeper in his exploration of the Arts. Perl centered much of his argument around artists rooted in artistic traditions from Europe, Russia, and the Americas. This made the book feel small and closed off to the questions that would arise if Perl had considered artistic traditions from cultures that differ from those in the US and Europe or if he had even considered cultures from within the US and Europe whose practices cannot be traced back to Greece (such as Indigenous peoples and people within the African diaspora). Maybe this is something he will explore in a later book, or perhaps another critic or artist can use this book as the basis for further exploration.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book! I think I have been searching for a book that articulated these points for years, without knowing it. It’s a brilliant, succinct analysis defending the idea that “relevance” (ideology - political, social, economic, etc), what Harold Bloom referred proponents of this perspective to as “the school of resentment,” as the main criteria for judging the value of a work of art can blind you to the aesthetic beauty and complexity and conflict that makes up great works of art. Great works operate within the boundaries of authority (the ordering impulse) and the freedom (the love of experiment and play) by the artist. Great art does not exist primarily to promote an ideology, like cheap propaganda or public service announcements to bring awareness to X, Y, or Z. The book promotes the idea of aesthetics over ideology in considering works of art. It’s a great antidote to the ideology-obsessed age that we are currently suffering through.

[Ben Wunder · Rating 3 out of 5]

The central premise of this book is an interesting discussion on where art exists in relation to society in the Western world in regards to the interplay between authority and freedom, restriction and creativity. As some others point out though, it becomes a bit repetitive without adding much in its redundancy, and its focus on art in the western world without branching outside of a few monoliths of history made the book feel incomplete. It reads like it's meant to be a treatise on art and humanity, but it avoids discussion on art outside of the European tradition and outside of the fine art world.

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has an interesting perspective and one that separates the art from the artist. It may be biased at times but the argument it makes is in favor of the creative arts and the freedom of the artist to be able to create on the traditions or buck traditions or genre conventions of their chosen art form. I read it as an audible but am also adding the book to my library to unpack this rich text.

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It is intelligent. Interesting survey of a variety of works

[Alex Tripp · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5
Articulates in a clear eyed and confident manner so many things I have tried and failed to express

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

See here.

[Christopher McQuain · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[jillian rahn]

A little one-note but a good syllabus for a mind that has not been here in a minute (<--me).

[Rod Holdaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is timely and relevant to Australian artists, critics, arts administrators and funding bodies.

[Van_Veren]

3.1