22 The New York ReviewThe Imaginative Imperative
John BanvilleAuthority and Freedom:
A Defense of the Arts
by Jed Perl.
Knopf, 161 pp., $20.00An anecdote: it is twenty or so years
ago, and two friends, J. and M., are in
Florence, relaxedly on the trail of some
of the city’s less well known artistic trea-
sures. In a nondescript street, M. pauses
before a nondescript church, which, ac-
cording to his Royal Automobile Club
guidebook to Italy, published in 1928—
yes, he has his eccentricities—houses
a fragment of a mural by Filippo Lippi
(1406–1469) that is not to be missed.
They enter the church, deserted on
this weekday morning, and stand in the
spot where what survives of the mural
is supposedly to be found. However, on
the wall there is only an enormous and
exceedingly bad painting, in a heavy
wooden frame, done primarily in weary
shades of brown, depicting a Tuscan
landscape with dim saints and sentinel
cypresses and an unidentifiable bird on
a bough. Not a mural, certainly, and
certainly not a work by Lippi.
Disappointed, the two begin to turn
away, until J. notices, at the right- hand
side of the frame, two rusty hinges,
and, on the other side, a six- inch nail
hammered into the wall at an angle and
acting as a latch. He grasps the nail,
turns it, and, with an effort, draws open
the painting on its hinges. And there
before them on the pristine wall is the
fragment of Lippi’s mural.
It is no more than a ragged- edged
circular patch the size of a large platter.
It depicts the haloed head of John the
Evangelist, Jesus’ favorite disciple, and
behind him, in the middle distance, a
servant woman hanging out washing
on a clothesline, with a frisky little
white dog gamboling at her feet. After
a long, silent consideration of the work,
J. draws the big brown picture to the
wall, turns the nail to latch it shut, and
the two friends depart.
Years pass, and one day the pair find
themselves in Florence again. J. sug-
gests that they should stop and have
another look at Lippi’s Saint John.
The trouble is, M. has forgotten which
church they visited on that previous oc-
casion, and he no longer has his antique
RAC guidebook. So the precious frag-
ment is relost, and who can say when it
will be found again, if ever?
This raises a number of questions, the
most interesting one being: In what cat-
egory or condition of art does the Lippi
fragment now exist? Perhaps only the
two friends know it is there, and they
cannot find it. Yet undoubtedly it is still
a work of art, which in its present state
of concealment is, one might say, inac-
tive yet not inconsequential, unseen yet
vividly existent. Indeed, it can claim to
possess in an extreme and highly puri-
fied form an essential quality of all true
art, which is the quality of hiddenness.
Art, and great art especially, to an
extent always withholds itself, conceals
itself, in the plainest of plain sight; the
work of art is at once there and not there.
This withdrawnness is one of the qual-
ities, perhaps the most important one,
that contribute to the work’s inexhaust-
ibility, the attribute that compels us to
return again and again to the painting,
the poem, the sonata, the novel, as to amystery we shall never solve, although
the effort, the repeated interrogation of
the work, is a source of undiminishing
interest and aesthetic pleasure.
Look at Velázquez’s Las Meninas;
read something as transparent- seeming
as Philip Larkin’s near- perfect lyric
poem “Cut Grass”; listen to almost
anything by Bach: the longer you lis-
ten, read, or look, the deeper the mys-
tery becomes. What exactly is being
said here, you ask yourself, and, more
significantly, what is not being said, or
what is being said but not to us; what is
being withheld?
In Authority and Freedom, his brief,
timely, understated, but wholly persua-
sive polemic, Jed Perl writes:At the heart of every encounter
with a work of art—whether sacred
or secular, public or private, mass-
market or avant- garde—there’s the
enigma of the work itself, which,
even when designed to serve some
apparently cut- and- dried purpose,
only really succeeds when the art-
ist or artists involved are driven by
an imaginative imperative.The mystery of the “imaginative im-
perative” was less apparent in the ep-
ochs in which the artistic labor that
went into the making of a work was
considered irrelevant to the purpose of
the piece, whether as an earthly sym-
bolization of the divine, as an emblem
of the power of princes, as the blazon of
a nation’s consciousness of itself, or just
as a precious object to be bought and
sold, shown off and prized.^1A change came about with the Re-
naissance, when artists, or some artists,
exercising newfound powers of realistic
representation, new subtleties of nar-
ration, new harmonies and sonorities,
began to claim autonomy for the ob-
jects they produced. As the centuries
progressed, artists such as Josquin des
Prez, Shakespeare, or Caravaggio must
have given the more intellectually alert
among their patrons at least a twinge
or two of serious unease. Prince Es-
terházy could require Haydn to wear
servants’ livery, but some among the
nobleman’s household and the world
beyond would have known which of the
two, the prince or the composer, was
the greater figure whose works would
live far beyond the grave.Jed Perl is one of the most perceptive,
most intelligent, and most vigilant art
critics writing today. He has worked
and written for a number of magazines,
including Vog u e and The New York Re-
view. His books include Paris Without
End: On French Art Since World War
I (1988); a two- volume biography of
Alexander Calder (2017 and 2020); An-
toine’s Alphabet (2008), a superb study
of Watteau; and New Art City (2005), an
account of Manhattan as the new center,
or at least the self- proclaimed new cen-
ter, of the art world in the mid- twentieth
century. When he was the art critic at
The New Republic, he issued a collec-
tion of essays, Eyewitness: Reports from
an Art World in Crisis (2000), deploring
the increasingly voracious marketing
drive in the buying and selling of art.
In 2007, when the capitalist engine
worldwide was overheating, he pub-
lished a controversial essay in The New
Republic on what he perceived as a
novel and deeply pernicious phenome-
non, which he called “laissez- faire aes-
thetics.” In 2012, after the economic
gaskets had blown, he reprinted it as
the introduction to his significantly
titled essay collection Magicians and
Charlatans: Essays on Art and Cul-ture, in which he expressed alarm at
the ways in which what he unapologeti-
cally designated high culture was being
taken over by, or cravenly capitulating
to, the pop market on the one hand and
deep- pocketed speculative buyers on
the other.^2 The problem, he wrote in
that essay, “is not with popular culture,
but with the wholesale imposition of its
methods and values on an alien terrain.
It is this muddling of the realms that
fuels the insane art commerce of our
day.” He then delves into the muddle
in an effort to separate its constituents:The art in popular culture has ev-
erything to do with creating a work
that catalyzes a strain of feeling in
the mass audience. High art oper-
ates in a completely different way,
for each viewer comes to the work
with the fullest, the most intense,
the most personal awareness of the
conventions and traditions of an
artform.In other words, if you wish to experi-
ence high art—merely to use the term
would today be a heroic and certainly
provocative gesture—you must have
been educated, or you must have ed-
ucated yourself, in highly specialized
forms of language, signs, and sounds.
Laissez- faire aesthetics greets any-
thing and everything with tolerance, “a
tolerance so bland that it really amounts
to indifference.” High culture, on the
contrary, “is always daringly, rightfully,
triumphantly intolerant.” Imagine the
cries of protest such assertions would
have provoked back in 2007, if the art
world had not been so busy crating up
modern “masterpieces” and shipping
them off to the heavily guarded and
air- conditioned freeports where the
billionaire investors store their art loot.
Although little has changed since
2007 or 2012, except perhaps for the
worse, Perl in his new book adopts a
somewhat less forceful tone than he did
in the New Republic essay. It is not that
he has softened his opinions or that he
is any less concerned for the health of
our culture. He is, as his subtitle indi-
cates, intent on defending the arts, but
such a defense in these debased times
calls for a certain amount of sweet rea-
soning to sugar the argument.
In Authority and Freedom he has
something of what we might imagine
to have been the attitude of a native of
Rome, say, in the years after the bar-
barian conquest of the city, when the
slaughter and rapine had come to an
end, and the Romefied invaders were to
be seen strolling about the Forum and
among the cypresses on the Pincian
Hill as if they owned the place. Where
art today is concerned, the Visigoths
are in the citadel, and the old gods have
become mere eyeless statues.Perl sets out his case in a way that
makes it look simple, or as simple as
such an intricate and urgent case can
be, yet he is no less certain than ever
of the validity of his opinions and ofYasumasa Morimura: Las Meninas renacen de noche VII: In fact,
nothing really happened, 2013Yasumasa Morimura/Luhring Augustine, New York(^1) There has to be some aspect of an art-
work that sets it apart from even the
most elaborately fashioned piece of
craftsmanship. Chief among these, as
R. G. Collingwood points out in The
Principles of Art (1938), is that the
work of art consumes its materials. An
exquisitely fashioned majolica pot is
still majolica; Las Meninas is not paint
and canvas, it is Las Meninas.
(^2) One of the leading charlatans was,
almost inevitably, Andy Warhol, who,
Perl suggests, “first saw the Promised
Land of laissez- faire aesthetics.”
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