AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a call to reaffirm the independence of all the arts - musical, literary, and visual -- and celebrate their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us, even in a time of social, political, and economic turmoil.

As more and more people look to the arts to promote a particular idea or ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl reminds us that the arts have their own laws, logic, and power, which transcend the concerns of any particular moment. "Art's relevance," he writes, "has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance." In a book that embraces creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin, Perl argues that the true power of art lies in its ability to free us from fixed definitions, coordinates, or categories.

He insists on the inherently uncategorizable nature of the artistic imagination. Reaching for inspiration to artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl insists that works of art aren't blunt statements beamed out into the world but adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned, which emerge from a creative spirit's engagement with the tools and traditions of a particular medium. He reaffirms the fundamental sense of vocation 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 is a book that everybody who cares about the arts and their future will want to read.

JED PERL a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade and the art critic of The New Republic for twenty years Among his many books are Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine's Alphabet, New Art City, and a two
volume biography of the sculptor Alexander Calder. He lives in New York City.