Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

by Jed Perl Narrated by Daniel Oreskes

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

Daniel Oreskes’s strategic pauses work well to clarify complex phrasing, often making the exact meaning of a sentence jump into the spotlight. This use of his dramatic skills, along with his clear voice and assertive tone, makes absorbing this thoughtful writing an invigorating experience. Artistic innovation versus the authority of tradition is the subject of this defense of how art breaks molds and rebels against existing standards. In the musical, visual, and literary arts, the author says artists need those molds and traditions to ground what they do within an artistic lineage. However, the essence of transformational art is to not be constrained by political and cultural boundaries but to create work that is independent of fixed definitions and categories of correctness. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

"Authority and Freedom puts its argument quietly . . . But it is an essential tract for our time, and no less a prescription for the health of contemporary culture because it eschews stridency and cajoles rather than hectors . . . Jed Perl is one of the most perceptive, most intelligent, and most vigilant art critics writing today . . . [a] brief, timely, understated, but wholly persuasive polemic." —John Banville, The New York Review of Books

"Authority and Freedom is a beautiful essay because it is written with an elegant ease . . . [Jed Perl] draws us back to the origins of our own intellectual situation, and he does so with an argument that is intended to address not just our moment, but the whole of the modern era in the arts. He does it effortlessly, too, and with a conversational air, a man at ease among the millennia, now in conversation with the Egyptian tomb painters, now with Aretha Franklin. Yes, a great and beautiful essay." —Paul Berman, Public Seminar

 
“A moving and passionate defense of the arts in and for themselves . . . Authority and Freedom’s argument for the intrinsic value of art leaves readers with questions to ponder. This may be the result of Perl’s inviting and creative combinations of memoir and learned analysis, which naturally elicit personal reflection, and arguments possibly left unfinished.” —Daniel Lelchuk, The Bulwark
“Reads like a free-range cornucopia of revelatory encounters Perl has had with books, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, film and dance. He radiates sheer pleasure with his very personal responses to art of all kinds, writing with warmth and a sense of gratitude for the many peak experiences he’s had from a lifetime of engagement. Although he’s best known for his critical essays on painting and sculpture—Perl was for years art columnist for The New Republic—he is an omnivore of all media.” —John Adams, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Perl, a storied art critic and the author of a magisterial two-volume biography of Alexander Calder among much else, has written an astute analysis of the conditions that make art possible. Having established that, he proceeds to an argument for their preservation. Along the way he reveals that the current vogue for relevance repeats errors that crop up regularly in human history.” —Franklin Einspruch, Quillette

"[A] measured but emphatic case for art for art’s sake [and] a penetrating look at the long-simmering tension between the yen for artistic freedom and the pressure to create a work of social value.” —Shelf Awareness

“[A] passionate and cerebral work . . . Draws a line from the past to the conundrum at hand today . . . A thought-provoking exploration into the limits and liberation that art can impose and unlock. Creatives in any field should give this a serious look.” —Publishers Weekly

“A wide-ranging study of the nature and meaning of artistic creation [examining] the tension between the ‘ordering impulse’ of authority and the freedom to experiment and play . . . A thoughtful meditation on the transcendence of art.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A powerful argument against the politicization and trivialization of the arts. Jed Perl reminds us how much we need artists to illuminate our experience and help us understand our world.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy

“In his commanding reflections, Jed Perl illumines and resolves the riddle of contradiction through a credo of linked opposites: authority and freedom. Michelangelo adheres to the ancient architectural tenets of Vitruvius while at the same time dazzling with innovation. Aretha Franklin is heir to the rhythmic old framework of Gospel singing, yet distills from it tones and concentrations of her own. How forerunner genius collaborates with newborn genius is the lambent theme of Authority and Freedom. Taking his turn in the long, long chronicle of art criticism, Perl stands today as our generation’s most masterly re-maker of genius.” —Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities and The Puttermesser Papers

“Jed Perl makes a persuasive argument for a kind of ‘middle way’ in the arts, one that is neither strictly formalist nor identitarian. Perl wants us to pay close attention to how works of art are actually made, and he outlines the ways in which artists of widely divergent temperaments, backgrounds, and histories engage with, or against, the material forms of their disciplines.” —David Salle, painter and author of How to See

“Jed Perl argues persuasively, passionately, and beautifully that ‘art for art’s sake’ is art for everyone’s sake—for everything’s sake. Our cultural and political future depend on it. Authority and Freedom is a crucial avatar of the liberal spirit—and an insatiable polemic of democratic love.” —Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers and The Netanyahus

“This is a book about the creativity of artists and the discipline of art. Jed Perl’s beautiful account of the ‘making’ of novels, plays, paintings, concertos, songs, and performances of all sorts, is a tribute to the makers. But it isn’t written for them. It is written for the rest of us, who read, listen, look, and watch, and its achievement is, as Auden wrote, ‘to teach the free man how to praise’ (the free woman, too).” —Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

Daniel Oreskes’s strategic pauses work well to clarify complex phrasing, often making the exact meaning of a sentence jump into the spotlight. This use of his dramatic skills, along with his clear voice and assertive tone, makes absorbing this thoughtful writing an invigorating experience. Artistic innovation versus the authority of tradition is the subject of this defense of how art breaks molds and rebels against existing standards. In the musical, visual, and literary arts, the author says artists need those molds and traditions to ground what they do within an artistic lineage. However, the essence of transformational art is to not be constrained by political and cultural boundaries but to create work that is independent of fixed definitions and categories of correctness. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-10-12
What is art for?

In a wide-ranging study of the nature and meaning of artistic creation, art critic Perl draws on the work of writers, composers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, architects, and actors to examine the tension between the “ordering impulse” of authority and the freedom to experiment and play, which, he argues, all artists confront as they reshape experiences into creative work. “Artistic freedom,” Perl argues, “always involves engaging with some idea of order,” which the artist understands as a form of authority, but to which he doesn’t “necessarily entirely submit.” When an artist responds to the tradition and discipline of a particular medium, he continually asks, “How do I find freedom within authority?” Perl ranges across time, place, and culture—from Peter Paul Rubens to Aretha Franklin, Michelangelo to Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers—to explore ways that artists struggle with authority. Their responses can be “grave, reverent, and saturnine,” he notes, or skeptical, satirical, or mystical. Besides looking directly at artists and their creations, Perl examines writers such as Henry James (“The Art of Fiction”), T.S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”), and philosophers Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, whose considerations of authority, obedience, and constraint Perl finds salient. The author’s overarching aim is to argue that art must be released “from the stranglehold of relevance.” In a time of political, social, economic, and environmental challenges, Perl regrets that artists, and the work they produce, may be expected to comment on the pressures of the moment. Labeling art feminist, radical, conservative, or gay does not account fully for its meaning in the world. Art, Perl insists, has “an authority of its own.” As W.H. Auden put it, in an essay on Yeats, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Perl asserts that art allows us “to enter into the life of our time or any other time.”

A thoughtful meditation on the transcendence of art.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176038057
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1 THE VALUE OF ART

Authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts. Whether reading a novel, looking at a painting, or listening to music, we are feeling the push and pull of these two forces as they shape the creator’s work. Authority is the ordering impulse. Freedom is the love of experiment and play. They coexist. They compete. Even a child, setting out to write a story, recognizes the authority of certain conventions, if only the need for a beginning, a middle, and an end. To love to look at paintings is to love, almost before anything else, the certainty of the rectangle, the delimiting shape. But why not feel free to do something different? Why must a story have a beginning, a middle, an end? Why must a painting be on a rectangle? One way of acknowledging authority is by opposing it—by writing, for instance, a story that ends inconclusively, open-­endedly. The authority of art functions almost simultaneously as an inhibition and an incitement. The limitations sharpen the fantasy, clarify the feeling—they precipitate freedom.

A century ago the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about this “long quarrel between tradition and invention,” and I see no reason to believe that the quarrel will ever end. It shouldn’t. It mustn’t. Without this quarrel—what really amounts to an epic debate—art doesn’t exist. The rival claims of authority and freedom kick off passionate responses and principled stands, both with artists and with audiences. Which is as it should be. But these passions and principles, which are never easy to reconcile or disentangle, can all too easily leave people at loggerheads. Somebody says, “I’ll stick with the classics.” Another person wonders, “How about something really new?” Conservatives argue for continuity. Radicals demand relevance. Soon a third person announces, “All art is political.” Everybody knows we’re navigating perilous waters. When it comes to the arts, who is to say what’s conservative and what’s radical? Is creative authority inherently conservative? Is creative freedom inherently radical? People of goodwill disagree. Is Jane Austen conservative or radical? Probably both—and neither. A disagreement about a movie or a play, while it may not cut as deep as a disagreement about politics, will cut nonetheless. A shared affection for the work of a particular artist—a novelist, a painter, or a pop singer—can become a bonding experience. Alliances are formed and arguments are advanced—in casual conversations, college classrooms, and foundation boardrooms. What do we think about the work of a writer or a painter who treats women badly? Or an opera that had its premiere in Nazi Germany? What strikes one person as impregnable can strike another as fragile. There are times when the arguments get so heated that they threaten to overwhelm the art.

When questions of authority and freedom and the arts aren’t framed in political terms, they’re often couched in psychological terms. This isn’t surprising. The artist’s struggle with authority is intimate and immediate—Freud saw authority as inhering in the figure of the father—but the struggle is not exclusively or even primarily psychological. When it comes to the arts, I think both political and psychological analogies are inadequate. I prefer to consider authority and freedom in relation to philosophical traditions that go back to ancient times. The authority of the rectangle for the painter or the conventions of beginning, middle, and end for the fiction writer are general, societal, traditional. I will return to these matters later on, but for now it’s important to make the point that authority and freedom, as they animate the arts, are overarching, all-­encompassing traditions—principles that anybody, whether or not they’re actively engaged in the arts, can comprehend. That’s what makes them so persuasive—and, on occasion, so provocative. Artists, however much they are shaped by their time and place and by the ideas and ideals that animate their age, must reshape experience. That’s their mandate. The reshaping, which turns experience into art, is both artisanal (a matter of mastering the tools of the trade, whether words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movements) and metaphysical (a never-­ending competition between the rival claims of authority and freedom). The metaphysical is embedded in the artisanal.

What generations of artists and critics have described (and sometimes dismissed) as formal concerns are much more than that. To write, to paint, to compose is to struggle with what is possible and impossible within the constraints of a medium. For the artist the medium is a world unto itself, but the struggle within the medium is also a way of coming to terms with the struggle between the possible and the impossible that plays out in the wider world. The pacing of a novel, the quality of a painter’s brushwork, the sonorities that a composer discovers in the orchestra are transformations of the nature of the novel, the painting, and the symphony that pit the authority of a tradition against the freedom of the individual artist. Creative work raises a series of questions. What do I owe to authority? How do I find freedom within authority? Can I regard freedom as a form of authority? 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. The singularity of an artistic endeavor—the way the individual works out the dynamic between authority and freedom—is set in a history. That history is everybody’s history.

We understand why Anna, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, as she sits in her room in London trying to write finds herself imagining a Chinese peasant or a Third World freedom fighter asking her, “Why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?” In the face of the social, economic, and political challenges that we see all around us, we may find it hard to justify the intensely intimate experience that we have with a novel, a concerto, or a painting. We may fear that the arts are a distraction—a problem. That fear isn’t new. Time and again poetry, painting, music, dance, and theater have been viewed as a threat, precisely because there’s so much that’s unruly and uncategorizable in their power to beguile, enchant, educate, elevate, transport, and transform. More than two thousand years ago Plato worried that a great poet posed a danger to an ideal society; in Renaissance Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola excoriated what he described as the profanity of the art of his day; and Tolstoy, in What Is Art?, the book he published in the 1890s, called into question his own naturalistic novels along with the work of Dante and Shakespeare. (He characterized their work as “brain-­spun.”) In our time of social, economic, environmental, and political anxiety and unrest, many are asking whom the arts speak for. Do they speak for some particular group? Do they speak truth to power? Picasso, reacting to demands that the arts make some simple kind of sense, responded with a riddle: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” The question that many people are asking right now—and it’s not entirely different from the questions that Plato, Savonarola, and Tolstoy were asking centuries ago— ­is whose lies and whose truths art is meant to reveal.

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