A thoughtful meditation on the transcendence of art.
What is art for?
In a wide-ranging study of the nature and meaning of artistic creation, art critic Perl draws on the work of writers, composers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, architects, and actors to examine the tension between the “ordering impulse” of authority and the freedom to experiment and play, which, he argues, all artists confront as they reshape experiences into creative work. “Artistic freedom,” Perl argues, “always involves engaging with some idea of order,” which the artist understands as a form of authority, but to which he doesn’t “necessarily entirely submit.” When an artist responds to the tradition and discipline of a particular medium, he continually asks, “How do I find freedom within authority?” Perl ranges across time, place, and culture—from Peter Paul Rubens to Aretha Franklin, Michelangelo to Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers—to explore ways that artists struggle with authority. Their responses can be “grave, reverent, and saturnine,” he notes, or skeptical, satirical, or mystical. Besides looking directly at artists and their creations, Perl examines writers such as Henry James (“The Art of Fiction”), T.S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”), and philosophers Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, whose considerations of authority, obedience, and constraint Perl finds salient. The author’s overarching aim is to argue that art must be released “from the stranglehold of relevance.” In a time of political, social, economic, and environmental challenges, Perl regrets that artists, and the work they produce, may be expected to comment on the pressures of the moment. Labeling art feminist, radical, conservative, or gay does not account fully for its meaning in the world. Art, Perl insists, has “an authority of its own.” As W.H. Auden put it, in an essay on Yeats, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Perl asserts that art allows us “to enter into the life of our time or any other time.”
A thoughtful meditation on the transcendence of art.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32005-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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