1 THE VALUE OF ART
Authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts. Whether reading a novel, looking at a painting, or listening to music, we are feeling the push and pull of these two forces as they shape the creator’s work. Authority is the ordering impulse. Freedom is the love of experiment and play. They coexist. They compete. Even a child, setting out to write a story, recognizes the authority of certain conventions, if only the need for a beginning, a middle, and an end. To love to look at paintings is to love, almost before anything else, the certainty of the rectangle, the delimiting shape. But why not feel free to do something different? Why must a story have a beginning, a middle, an end? Why must a painting be on a rectangle? One way of acknowledging authority is by opposing it—by writing, for instance, a story that ends inconclusively, open-endedly. The authority of art functions almost simultaneously as an inhibition and an incitement. The limitations sharpen the fantasy, clarify the feeling—they precipitate freedom.
A century ago the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about this “long quarrel between tradition and invention,” and I see no reason to believe that the quarrel will ever end. It shouldn’t. It mustn’t. Without this quarrel—what really amounts to an epic debate—art doesn’t exist. The rival claims of authority and freedom kick off passionate responses and principled stands, both with artists and with audiences. Which is as it should be. But these passions and principles, which are never easy to reconcile or disentangle, can all too easily leave people at loggerheads. Somebody says, “I’ll stick with the classics.” Another person wonders, “How about something really new?” Conservatives argue for continuity. Radicals demand relevance. Soon a third person announces, “All art is political.” Everybody knows we’re navigating perilous waters. When it comes to the arts, who is to say what’s conservative and what’s radical? Is creative authority inherently conservative? Is creative freedom inherently radical? People of goodwill disagree. Is Jane Austen conservative or radical? Probably both—and neither. A disagreement about a movie or a play, while it may not cut as deep as a disagreement about politics, will cut nonetheless. A shared affection for the work of a particular artist—a novelist, a painter, or a pop singer—can become a bonding experience. Alliances are formed and arguments are advanced—in casual conversations, college classrooms, and foundation boardrooms. What do we think about the work of a writer or a painter who treats women badly? Or an opera that had its premiere in Nazi Germany? What strikes one person as impregnable can strike another as fragile. There are times when the arguments get so heated that they threaten to overwhelm the art.
When questions of authority and freedom and the arts aren’t framed in political terms, they’re often couched in psychological terms. This isn’t surprising. The artist’s struggle with authority is intimate and immediate—Freud saw authority as inhering in the figure of the father—but the struggle is not exclusively or even primarily psychological. When it comes to the arts, I think both political and psychological analogies are inadequate. I prefer to consider authority and freedom in relation to philosophical traditions that go back to ancient times. The authority of the rectangle for the painter or the conventions of beginning, middle, and end for the fiction writer are general, societal, traditional. I will return to these matters later on, but for now it’s important to make the point that authority and freedom, as they animate the arts, are overarching, all-encompassing traditions—principles that anybody, whether or not they’re actively engaged in the arts, can comprehend. That’s what makes them so persuasive—and, on occasion, so provocative. Artists, however much they are shaped by their time and place and by the ideas and ideals that animate their age, must reshape experience. That’s their mandate. The reshaping, which turns experience into art, is both artisanal (a matter of mastering the tools of the trade, whether words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movements) and metaphysical (a never-ending competition between the rival claims of authority and freedom). The metaphysical is embedded in the artisanal.
What generations of artists and critics have described (and sometimes dismissed) as formal concerns are much more than that. To write, to paint, to compose is to struggle with what is possible and impossible within the constraints of a medium. For the artist the medium is a world unto itself, but the struggle within the medium is also a way of coming to terms with the struggle between the possible and the impossible that plays out in the wider world. The pacing of a novel, the quality of a painter’s brushwork, the sonorities that a composer discovers in the orchestra are transformations of the nature of the novel, the painting, and the symphony that pit the authority of a tradition against the freedom of the individual artist. Creative work raises a series of questions. What do I owe to authority? How do I find freedom within authority? Can I regard freedom as a form of authority? An artist brings to these traditions many personal inclinations and dispositions, but the act of painting, writing, composing, music-making, or dancing sets everything that is personal within a larger context. The singularity of an artistic endeavor—the way the individual works out the dynamic between authority and freedom—is set in a history. That history is everybody’s history.
We understand why Anna, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, as she sits in her room in London trying to write finds herself imagining a Chinese peasant or a Third World freedom fighter asking her, “Why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?” In the face of the social, economic, and political challenges that we see all around us, we may find it hard to justify the intensely intimate experience that we have with a novel, a concerto, or a painting. We may fear that the arts are a distraction—a problem. That fear isn’t new. Time and again poetry, painting, music, dance, and theater have been viewed as a threat, precisely because there’s so much that’s unruly and uncategorizable in their power to beguile, enchant, educate, elevate, transport, and transform. More than two thousand years ago Plato worried that a great poet posed a danger to an ideal society; in Renaissance Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola excoriated what he described as the profanity of the art of his day; and Tolstoy, in What Is Art?, the book he published in the 1890s, called into question his own naturalistic novels along with the work of Dante and Shakespeare. (He characterized their work as “brain-spun.”) In our time of social, economic, environmental, and political anxiety and unrest, many are asking whom the arts speak for. Do they speak for some particular group? Do they speak truth to power? Picasso, reacting to demands that the arts make some simple kind of sense, responded with a riddle: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” The question that many people are asking right now—and it’s not entirely different from the questions that Plato, Savonarola, and Tolstoy were asking centuries ago— is whose lies and whose truths art is meant to reveal.
1 THE VALUE OF ART
Authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts. Whether reading a novel, looking at a painting, or listening to music, we are feeling the push and pull of these two forces as they shape the creator’s work. Authority is the ordering impulse. Freedom is the love of experiment and play. They coexist. They compete. Even a child, setting out to write a story, recognizes the authority of certain conventions, if only the need for a beginning, a middle, and an end. To love to look at paintings is to love, almost before anything else, the certainty of the rectangle, the delimiting shape. But why not feel free to do something different? Why must a story have a beginning, a middle, an end? Why must a painting be on a rectangle? One way of acknowledging authority is by opposing it—by writing, for instance, a story that ends inconclusively, open-endedly. The authority of art functions almost simultaneously as an inhibition and an incitement. The limitations sharpen the fantasy, clarify the feeling—they precipitate freedom.
A century ago the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about this “long quarrel between tradition and invention,” and I see no reason to believe that the quarrel will ever end. It shouldn’t. It mustn’t. Without this quarrel—what really amounts to an epic debate—art doesn’t exist. The rival claims of authority and freedom kick off passionate responses and principled stands, both with artists and with audiences. Which is as it should be. But these passions and principles, which are never easy to reconcile or disentangle, can all too easily leave people at loggerheads. Somebody says, “I’ll stick with the classics.” Another person wonders, “How about something really new?” Conservatives argue for continuity. Radicals demand relevance. Soon a third person announces, “All art is political.” Everybody knows we’re navigating perilous waters. When it comes to the arts, who is to say what’s conservative and what’s radical? Is creative authority inherently conservative? Is creative freedom inherently radical? People of goodwill disagree. Is Jane Austen conservative or radical? Probably both—and neither. A disagreement about a movie or a play, while it may not cut as deep as a disagreement about politics, will cut nonetheless. A shared affection for the work of a particular artist—a novelist, a painter, or a pop singer—can become a bonding experience. Alliances are formed and arguments are advanced—in casual conversations, college classrooms, and foundation boardrooms. What do we think about the work of a writer or a painter who treats women badly? Or an opera that had its premiere in Nazi Germany? What strikes one person as impregnable can strike another as fragile. There are times when the arguments get so heated that they threaten to overwhelm the art.
When questions of authority and freedom and the arts aren’t framed in political terms, they’re often couched in psychological terms. This isn’t surprising. The artist’s struggle with authority is intimate and immediate—Freud saw authority as inhering in the figure of the father—but the struggle is not exclusively or even primarily psychological. When it comes to the arts, I think both political and psychological analogies are inadequate. I prefer to consider authority and freedom in relation to philosophical traditions that go back to ancient times. The authority of the rectangle for the painter or the conventions of beginning, middle, and end for the fiction writer are general, societal, traditional. I will return to these matters later on, but for now it’s important to make the point that authority and freedom, as they animate the arts, are overarching, all-encompassing traditions—principles that anybody, whether or not they’re actively engaged in the arts, can comprehend. That’s what makes them so persuasive—and, on occasion, so provocative. Artists, however much they are shaped by their time and place and by the ideas and ideals that animate their age, must reshape experience. That’s their mandate. The reshaping, which turns experience into art, is both artisanal (a matter of mastering the tools of the trade, whether words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movements) and metaphysical (a never-ending competition between the rival claims of authority and freedom). The metaphysical is embedded in the artisanal.
What generations of artists and critics have described (and sometimes dismissed) as formal concerns are much more than that. To write, to paint, to compose is to struggle with what is possible and impossible within the constraints of a medium. For the artist the medium is a world unto itself, but the struggle within the medium is also a way of coming to terms with the struggle between the possible and the impossible that plays out in the wider world. The pacing of a novel, the quality of a painter’s brushwork, the sonorities that a composer discovers in the orchestra are transformations of the nature of the novel, the painting, and the symphony that pit the authority of a tradition against the freedom of the individual artist. Creative work raises a series of questions. What do I owe to authority? How do I find freedom within authority? Can I regard freedom as a form of authority? An artist brings to these traditions many personal inclinations and dispositions, but the act of painting, writing, composing, music-making, or dancing sets everything that is personal within a larger context. The singularity of an artistic endeavor—the way the individual works out the dynamic between authority and freedom—is set in a history. That history is everybody’s history.
We understand why Anna, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, as she sits in her room in London trying to write finds herself imagining a Chinese peasant or a Third World freedom fighter asking her, “Why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?” In the face of the social, economic, and political challenges that we see all around us, we may find it hard to justify the intensely intimate experience that we have with a novel, a concerto, or a painting. We may fear that the arts are a distraction—a problem. That fear isn’t new. Time and again poetry, painting, music, dance, and theater have been viewed as a threat, precisely because there’s so much that’s unruly and uncategorizable in their power to beguile, enchant, educate, elevate, transport, and transform. More than two thousand years ago Plato worried that a great poet posed a danger to an ideal society; in Renaissance Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola excoriated what he described as the profanity of the art of his day; and Tolstoy, in What Is Art?, the book he published in the 1890s, called into question his own naturalistic novels along with the work of Dante and Shakespeare. (He characterized their work as “brain-spun.”) In our time of social, economic, environmental, and political anxiety and unrest, many are asking whom the arts speak for. Do they speak for some particular group? Do they speak truth to power? Picasso, reacting to demands that the arts make some simple kind of sense, responded with a riddle: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” The question that many people are asking right now—and it’s not entirely different from the questions that Plato, Savonarola, and Tolstoy were asking centuries ago— is whose lies and whose truths art is meant to reveal.
For National Poetry Month in April, we are sharing poetry collections and books about poetry by authors who have their own stories to tell. These poets delve into history, reimagine the present, examine poetry itself, provide insight on grief and reflection—from traditional poems many know and love to poems and voices that are new and
In honor of Arab American Heritage Month in April, we are sharing books by Arab and Arab American authors that share their culture, history, and personal lives.
