Perl's essential thesis that art must exist at the intersection of authority and freedom, between the requirements of production and the inciting passions of expression, is fine because it's an old idea. So instead we have to turn our attention to the reason that Perl has resurrected this old idea. What significance does this have for us now, exactly?

Well, Perl is effusive on this point. He wants to defend the arts, but he's too much of a coward to place any particular blame. The closest we get in this book is something like this: "When we rush to label them—as radical, conservative, liberal, gay, straight, feminist, Black, or white—we may describe a part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value. And without that the arts are nothing."

So we are against constraning artworks in any sort of external ideology, and should instead look at their intrinsic freestanding value. But what is that freestanding value? By way of explaining, Perl tends to focus on those artworks that transcend the particular circumstances of their creation. He believes that those artworks that we consider "great" now have some kernel within them that allowed this transcendence.

I was most struck by Perl's lack of curiosity about how these narratives of greatness are formed. He seems to think that they are natural, even inevitable, but I disagree. The canon of any art form has to be constructed. The works of art that were considered great hundreds of years ago are not necessarily the ones that will be considered great today, and likewise, the works of art we deem great today may not be considered great hundreds of years in the future. Greatness is a relative value, not an immovable principle, and values change, so the idea that they must all contain the same kernel of greatness is simply not true.

It is not a mistake that the majority of Perl's examples of artistic greatness are titans of the Western canon. Their greatness has been constructed by generations of patrons, audiences, critics, funding boards, and scholars before him and handed to Perl on a silver platter, but he has not bothered to examine how the sausage gets made.

Perl's disinterested aesthetics is founded on what he sees as our present moment of freedom, but that moment is not as free as he is pretending. I am struck by this passage:

"If now, more than a generation later, I find myself called upon to try to explain why the arts matter, it certainly isn’t because I’m living in a country where there is a threat of anything resembling the Nazi book burnings, Stalinist gulags, or mass murders and reeducation programs that the Maoists encouraged in the name of the Cultural Revolution. People in many parts of the world still risk their lives and their freedom when they embrace certain ideas about the value of art, but such dangers do not exist in the United States, where I live, or in most of Western Europe, or in some other parts of the world."

In a period of nearly unprecedented censorship of LGBT books, banning of drag performances, attacks on scholarship of critical race theory, silencing of academic freedom, and the list goes on, I'm shocked that he can think this way. Get your head out of your ass, Jed. Look around you.

This book is a failure because Perl is unwilling to address how "freestanding value" is constructed. He is not willing to examine how the new calls of the arts to be socially responsive are not refusals of arts' value, but actions made towards the construction of a new artistic value. Finally, because he is not willing to examine why that is necessary in the first place, the book will swiftly become irrelevant.