Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts Archives

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Pythagorean Mysticism

Three observations on “Authority and Freedom”

March 2, 2022 • by Paul Berman

Art has always been an instrument of social oppression, except on occasion when it has been an instrument of resistance. Such is art’s meaning. And, in order to resist oppression, we ought to go about judging art on the basis of which side it supports, the side of vice, or ...

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

The Arts and the “Fierce Urgency of Now”

Our supposedly universal traditions have left too much out

March 2, 2022 • by Katha Pollitt

Perl writes of the need to relate deeply to tradition and the past—he’s basically a proponent of art for art’s sake—but there are different traditions and different pasts. Maybe the problem is that our supposedly universal traditions have left out too much. ...

The Arts and the “Fierce Urgency of Now”

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

The Hip-Hop Revolution that Never Happened

Why it’s foolish to expect any form of art to change the world

March 2, 2022 • by John McWhorter

Today, hip-hop lives on without most fans taking seriously the fantasy that it will trigger a revolution or even increase political activism—that conceit now feels as antique as an iPod. Even a form of poetry as viscerally compelling as hip-hop cannot, it would seem, change the world....

The Hip-Hop Revolution that Never Happened

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

How Many Americans Believe that Art Has Any Value?

The real threat to the arts today

March 1, 2022 • by Lindsey Scharold

When I worked for an arts non-profit in suburban Minnesota, I saw the widespread lack of appreciation for the arts firsthand....

How Many Americans Believe that Art Has Any Value?

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

A young woman’s love song finds its Platonic form

March 1, 2022 • by Ingrid Rowland

When the curtains opened in the Kennedy Center forty-eight years later to reveal Aretha Franklin in a floor-length mink with a glittering clutch purse in her hand, they didn’t herald a performance: they announced an epiphany....

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Revolution in the Service of Poetry?

Would-be fascists on the Right and would-be commissars on the Left

February 28, 2022 • by Greil Marcus

There are would-be fascists on the right and would-be commissars on the left. All they need is institutional power, and they will speak as art, against art: Caesar will become God, and God will tell Caesar it is right....

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

February 28, 2022 • by Jed Perl

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....