24 The New York Reviewhis continuing duty to air them. He be-
gins as if his intention is to write not a
polemic but a primer, even if a highly
sophisticated one. His first chapter has
the innocent- sounding title “The Value
of Art,” and it is in the tone of a mod-
est, considerate, and patient persuader
that he proffers to the reader a gently
guiding hand. In his opening sentence,
he makes sure we understand that the
two terms in his title are not so much
antithetical as complementary:Authority and freedom are the
lifeblood of the arts. Whether
reading a novel, looking at a paint-
ing, or listening to music, we are
feeling the push and pull of these
two forces as they shape the cre-
ator’s work. Authority is the order-
ing impulse. Freedom is the love of
experiment and play. They coexist.
They compete.He quotes from a century ago the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire, a central figure
in the early years of modernism, writ-
ing about the “long quarrel between
tradition and invention”—which is
another way of saying “authority and
freedom,” of course—and notes that
without this ongoing quarrel, this “epic
debate,” there can be no art.
Following Apollinaire’s cue, he
muses on the differing approaches to,
and demands of, art, among both artists
and audiences. What is radical, what
conservative? Under which of these ru-
brics shall we place, for example, Jane
Austen? Well, a feminist might see her
as radical in her subtle portrayal of the
social and economic predicament of
women—which has not altered much
since her time—but a Black Lives Mat-
ter activist would surely condemn her
for her silence on slavery, from which
so much of the wealth of the British
Empire derived. Still others might say,
Who any longer reads Jane Austen
anyway?
These considerations quickly lead
Perl to the heart of the matter, or the
heart of what he takes to be the matter:The idea of the work of art as an
imaginative achievement to which
the audience freely responds is
now too often replaced by the as-
sumption that a work of art should
promote a particular idea or ideol-
ogy, or perform some clearly de-
fined civic or community service.In response to, in opposition to, such
assumptions, which in our time have
b e c ome rei fie d to a deg re e t hat i s h ig h ly
alarming for the concerned observer
and the unfashionable critic, Perl sets
out some carefully worded precepts
for the making and appreciation of au-
thentic art. The first is a form of that
ringing directive framed by Yeats in his
call upon poets to “learn your trade.”
The task of the artist, Perl insists, is to
“reshape experience.” This reshapingis both artisanal (a matter of
mastering the tools of the trade,
whether words, colors, shapes,
sounds, or movements) and meta-
physical (a never- ending compe-
tition between the rival claims of
authority and freedom). The meta-
physical is embedded in the mate-
rial. [Emphasis added.]The artist must bow to the demands
of the craft before he or she can claimto be an artist at all—“To be an artist
is to make things.” This requires work.
A great many people imagine that they
can achieve their artistic potential, the
existence of which they do not for a mo-
ment doubt, by an act of will; for are we
not all artists, even if only potentially
so? Remember the snooty little girl in
the Peanuts cartoon who observed air-
ily that she would be as good a pianist
as Rubinstein if she could just play the
notes. And of course, as a great pianist
she would be expressing herself and
her deepest thoughts and feelings, and,
more to the point, indulging her most
deeply held opinions. This is another
popular misconception about the doing
of art: that it is wholly about the self,
that the self has things to say that it is
necessary for the world to hear, and
that the saying of these things will be a
form of radical action.
No doubt the self is present in the
making and the appreciation of art;
how could it not be? But the self- in- art
is of a special kind, something like one
of John Cage’s prepared pianos, which
can do things an unprepared piano
cannot do, but also cannot do things an
unprepared piano can—such as play a
sonata by Beethoven. In art, we are atonce ourselves and other. As Perl ob-
serves, “The arts are simultaneously
dispassionate and impassioned. If this
is a paradox, it also explains their un-
dying fascination.”
This is a vital observation, a vital in-
sistence. What we get in and from art is
not feeling itself, but the feeling of what
feeling feels like. Art, of even the most
intensely expressed kind, is always at
one remove, which, even if this is a par-
adox, increases the intensity of its ef-
fects. We are always in pursuit of art; it
is always elusive, withdrawn, withheld.
Such a notion runs arrantly against the
popular conceptions of our time. And
this is Perl’s chief worry:I want us to release art from the
stranglehold of relevance—from
the insistence that works of art,
whether classic or contemporary,
are validated (or invalidated)
by the extent to which they line
up with (or fail to line up with)
our current social and political
concerns.Art must have its autonomy, must
be relevant to itself first and foremost.Even works of art created with other
than purely artistic aims, such as Gul-
liver’s Travels, say, or the sermons of
John Donne, only achieve their true
stature, their full autonomy, when they
float free from the political or religious
impulses that were present at their
creation. Guernica would be a greater
work of art than it is if Picasso had not
given it the title Guernica.
The demand for art to be relevant to
its time and to be effective in combat-
ing political, social, and moral ills is not
new. The critic George Steiner repeat-
edly expressed his consternation at the
fact that some of the most brutal Nazi
officials had a genuine appreciation of
the arts, that the commandant of a con-
centration camp in which thousands
were daily murdered could go home at
the end of his working day and listen
with pleasure and discrimination to re-
cordings of Schubert lieder or the late
quartets of Beethoven. But Steiner’s
dismay sprang from a misconception.
It is not the purpose, or the aim, of art
to make human beings better behaved,
more cognizant of moral strictures, or
more sympathetic to other members of
their species. Though we may balk at
the assertion, Auden was right when he
declared that “poetry makes nothing
happen,” and was right in his wish to
change the line in “September 1, 1939”
from “We must love one another or
die” to “We must love one another and
die.”
If art has a purpose other than sim-
ply existing, then surely it is to quicken
our sense of what it is to be in the
world, thinking, feeling, rejoicing, suf-
fering. In the Russian Formalist critic
Viktor Shklovsky’s great work Theory
of Prose, he offers the neologism os-
tranenie, which his English transla-
tor, Benjamin Sher, cleverly renders
as “enstrangement,” to describe the
effect that art has on the everyday
objects about us, so that we perceive
them in a new and revealing light. As
Shklovsky writes, in his idiosyncratic
fashion:Automatization eats away at
things, at clothes, at furniture, at
our wives, and at our fear of war....
And so, in order to return sensa-
tion to our limbs, in order to make
us feel objects, to make a stone feel
stony, man has been given the tool
of art.Authority and Freedom puts its argu-
ment quietly, and for that reason may
seem easy to ignore or dismiss. But it is
an essential tract for our time, and no
less a prescription for the health of con-
temporary culture because it eschews
stridency and cajoles rather than hec-
tors. Above all, it everywhere acknowl-
edges the challengingly weighty nature
of art:We often find ourselves pressed
to speak about art as conservative
or radical or liberal, but these are
rough metaphors for an experi-
ence that has an indissoluble life
of its own. That is art’s ultimate
value, a value that is confound-
ingly difficult to think or speak
about, precisely because there is
no analogy. Art is simply what it
is.And so it remains, triumphantly so,
even when hidden behind a big brown
daub. QREVISIONARY
I’ve decided to let my inner weather out.
Even in the nerves flashing, some things
are only shadow.
What’s up with that?
My muse bruises me.
Some days I sit hours to be relieved
by a word.
Today’s word is invisible.
I got it in a text picturing myself
in this landscape.I’m putting trouble into place, turning
toward what is.
Listening to stone translate into silence.
Here is an old rock covered with lichen
in the mossy forest inside the self.
I like it here when it’s green.
This is me evolving.
We get to meet ourselves where we are.
I’m hanging on. A whisper.
Certain prayers are tied to this ribbon.How in hell can nature throw clay into art
into a speaking being into air.
I saw a world that was an afternoon.
This cloud in my hand.
Sky pouring into sky reflecting the absolute
of the lake.
The flock and its tangle of shadow.Nearing the end, I could hear a lark.
Its trill fixing itself to my brain.
It seemed a thing becoming a wave.
A thing dissolving into the world
as I found it.
Illegible. Agrammatical.
To parse the velocity of trusses and stars
flowering here at the edge.
Calling me home.—Peter GizziBanville 22 24 .indd 24 3 / 23 / 22 2 : 50 PM