“You Make it Art First”
A reply to my critics
Authority and Freedom is dedicated to the freestanding value of the arts—a value that is absolute but not isolationist. ...
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Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015
A young woman’s love song finds its Platonic form
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....
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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
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....
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