Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
Jed Perl's thesis is an elegant and timeless paean to the arts, but with a warning
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart didn’t think that his decision for Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964 would become so iconic. “When I remember all of the other solid words I've written, I regret a little bit that if I'll be remembered at all I'll be remembered for that particular phrase,” he said in an interview in 1981. At issue was the Height Arts Theater’s exhibition of Louis Malle’s sexually charged film Les Amants (The Lovers) in Cleveland Heights. The State of Ohio had deemed Malle’s film “obscene.” Justice Stewart - along with the majority - disagreed. In his decision he explained that the film did not meet the “threshold” of hardcore pornography. In a legendary moment of candor, Stewart admitted that though he could not properly define hardcore pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
I was reminded of this quip when reading Jed Perl’s spectacular treatise on art, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts. Though I can’t define art properly, I know it when I see it. Or as Perl writes, “Art is simply what it is.” Though the definition of art is broad in one sense, in another, it is quite succinct, Perl explains: it is the timeless struggle between authority (the principles and structure of the craft) and freedom (the use and bending of its conventions). “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.” Filled with erudition and affection, Perl goes through countless examples of architecture, painting, musical compositions, and vocal performances that best demonstrates the struggle between freedom and authority - the principles of great art.
The tension within the art itself hardly ever stays there. Nearly every society is judged by the art it produces. Art, the “lie that makes us realize the truth,” as Picasso once explained (and Perl reiterates), can also be something to be feared. “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,” Perl says.
Though most of the book is geared towards those who fully create a work (painters, writers, composers, etc.), there is much to be gleaned from those who interpret and perform. In one passage that’s highly applicable to every performer, Perl writes, “The artist must engage with the freedom that’s possible within that tradition, so that making becomes an exploration of how things have been made in the past and involves some element of remaking—not replicating or reproducing but evaluating what has already been done and then making adjustments, whether large or small.”
“What the artist must first accept is the authority of an art form, the immersion in what others have done and achieved. Once the artist has begun to take all that in—it’s a process that never really ends—there comes the even greater challenge of asserting one’s freedom.”
Authority and Freedom is brief - bound at just over one hundred pages - but it is full-throated and relentless in its affections throughout. But it is not all sunshine and roses. Perl dresses down the idea of politically charged art. “It must be art first,” he scolds. And it needn’t be “relevant.” It was only fitting that the composer of Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams, who reviewed this for The New York Times seemingly shouted into the void for Perl to name which works he felt suffered from their political didacticism. But with respect to Mr. Adams, Jed Perl is right. Playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross) who is never one to mince words said in an interview that all art with a political message is “boring.” And the box office receipts have proven this to be the case. In a famous example at the height of the Third Reich in 1940, Franz Hippertz’s Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, bombed at the box office in Germany despite having even been fully endorsed in every media outlet by Joseph Goebbels.
Jed Perl is not shy about his far-left upbringing and he has long been a writer for The New York Review of Books. But he shows no compunction in punching left at Leon Trotsky’s grand treatise Literature and Revolution for its insistence that apolitical art was an example of “intellectual decline.” Perl systematically picks apart Trotsky’s fealty to the state in the guise of an artistic critique but it is dispassionate and based on the principles of art moreso than a politically ideological argument.
Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts is a gem that can be enjoyed by artists and art lovers alike. It is a love letter to artists while being fully aware of the struggles artists face both from within and without. “Popes, princes, and presidents may turn a painting or a poem to their advantage. But the struggle between authority and freedom—and the artist’s search for perfection or for anything else—is essentially shaped by the language of art, which is a language unto itself.”
You’ve definitely sold me on this book, but I wonder how you’re defining “political art”. Clearly Beaumarchais has lasted and he was considered political enough to be frequently banned by various authoritarian regimes. I think if you’re thinking “all *narrowly* political art is boring” that’s a sensible position.
Any work that is essentially a campaign commercial is doomed to become dated whatever its merits at the moment, but engaging with political issues (and taking a position) doesn’t necessarily invalidate art.