Art comprises the authority of craftsmanship and the freedom of interpretation, or the reworking of the craft’s tradition. Consequently, art must be subject to its own standards, and ought not subordinate to contemporary sociopolitics. The products of imagination possess an internal logic. The well-made work acknowledges tradition; the artist explores freedom within boundaries. Vocation is sacral: if you’re going to make something, you’d better know how to proceed. Then, truth is expressed in the context of form. Perl thus explains the failure of so-called performance art, which lacks craftsmanship. As the scientist’s work is to be independent, so too the artist’s, Perl writes. But what of ethics? 20th-century art can be characterized by the search for new sources of authority. But modern ‘playfulness’ ought to be more than a bid for attention, and any political opposition which artists engender or encounter tells us nothing of the caliber of their work. Conversely, the distinction between doing and making – roughly, general activity and work within the tradition – allows one to embrace good artists with questionable personal or sociopolitical traits. Perl derives understanding of authority from Hannah Arendt; he might have addressed the contemporary obsession with Foucaldian power. Still, aesthetic theory which restores the distinction between craft and all-embracing politics is welcome.

Isaiah Berlin: ‘Man is a rational being, and to say this is to say that he is able to detect this general pattern and purpose and identify himself with them; his wishes are rational if they aspire such self-identification, and irrational if they oppose it. To be free is to fulfil one’s wishes; one can fulfill one’s wishes only if one knows how to do so effectively, that is, if one understands the nature of the world in which one lives; if this world has a pattern and a purpose, to ignore this central fact is to court disaster. … To be free is to understand the universe. … The well-known Stoic argument that to understand and adapt oneself to nature is the truest freedom, rests on the premise that nature of the cosmos possess a pattern and a purpose; that human beings possess an inner light or reason which is that in them which seeks perfection by integrating itself as completely as possible with this cosmic pattern and purpose (p. 80).

TS Eliot: ‘the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new’ (p. 108).