About this item
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.
About the Author
Jed Perl, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, has been called by poet John Ashbery "an almost solitary, essential voice." And a reviewer in the Atlantic, writing about Magicians and Charlatans--Perl's most recent collection of essays --observed that he "may be the finest American critic at work today in any field." Perl was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade. The first volume of his biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder - Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 - has been published by Knopf this fall. "All artists are critics," the novelist Fran Lebowitz has written about Perl's biography of Calder, "but very few critics are artists. Jed Perl is one of those few."Among Jed Perl's many books are Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, which was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. He is also the editor of Art in America: 1945-1970, a 900-page anthology that he edited and introduced, published by the Library of America. He has written for Harper's, The New Criterion, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, the McNeil Lehrer News Hour, CNN, as well as National Public Radio; and he is a professor of Liberal Studies at The New School in New York City, where he lives with his wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal.
