The Stranglehold of Relevance

Also: A medieval pantry, the murder of Pablo Neruda, Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, and more.

Banksy wall graffiti in Bethlehem. Photo by Pawel Ryszawa. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

If you read one thing in this humble email, let me encourage you to read this interview in Salmagundi with Jed Perl about his new book, Authority and Freedom, which was published early last year, and which tries to loosen “the stranglehold of relevance” that is currently squeezing the life out of the arts. Robert Boyers—himself the author of the excellent The Tyranny of Virtues and founder and long-time editor of Salmagundi—starts by asking Perl what “evidence is there to support the idea that in the domain of the arts we are now largely governed by ‘the mistaken belief that artists who fail to respond to their social, economic, or political circumstances are turning their backs on the world’?”

“For evidence,” Perl responds, “I don’t think we need to look beyond the culture pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, where the political, social, and even sexual orientations of creative people are time and again foregrounded, while the particulars of their work – a prose style, a way of handling paint, the sounds a conductor coaxes from an orchestra – are seen as afterthoughts when they’re discussed at all.” More interestingly, he goes on to discuss how we got here: