AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM

I’ve been slightly incommunicado, having spent the better part of a week in Manhattan for the New York Encounter, upon which more later.

Then, upon returning home to my dear abode in Tucson, I realized with a start that I had left my laptop–with I’m sorry to say scads of unbacked-up work–in the TSA bin at LaGuardia!

So THAT’S been fun. I ordered a new laptop that very evening, Feburary 21. It was supposed to arrive in two days, but was eight days late and only arrived yesterday. So I had to compose and type my weekly column into, as well as kind of conduct a good part of life on, my phone.

Here’s the miracle: There is a very clear and fairly easy process whereby to file a claim for your lost-at-TSA goods, and by the very next morning I received an email saying “Good news! We have retrieved your item”…AND, they said, they would mail it to me.

The bad news is that I discovered after a few fruitless hours that it is apparently literally impossible for FedEx or UPS to print the necessary pre-paid mailing label from someone else to you. I could write an entire essay on the Kafkaesque morning I had at my local FedEx attempting to execute what seemed like this fairly straightforward transaction (Plus it would’ve cost something like $170 for a two-day delivery, not that I minded, but…really?)

The good news is that my dear friend Patrick, who lives in NYC, was coincidentally flying through LaGuardia on Monday and was able to pick up my precious (albeit totally battered) device. And he mailed it out USPS two-day yesterday for $17.10. I will hold off 1000% rejoicing till it’s delivered but all in all I would say St. Anthony is DEFINITELY ON MY SIDE.

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Meanwhile, last week came and went but here is the way my arts and culture column began:

Jed Perl was The New Republic art critic for 20 years, writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, and has published, among other titles, a two-volume biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder.

His newest book — Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, $14.89) — is a cri de coeur against the notion that art is only useful insofar as it advances or promotes a particular ideology, political stance, or “clearly defined civic or community service.”

That arts have their own independent significance was an idea that Perl took for granted growing up in the ’50s and ’60s. Over time he came to realize that attitudes toward art are in fact cyclical. During the Depression, for example, more and more people, including artists themselves, “began to insist that their work be viewed and evaluated through a social or political lens.”

That’s happening again now, obviously.

READ THE WHOLE COLUMN HERE.