AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM

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.