Leftward along the bookshelf is Authority and Freedom/A Defense of the Arts. It’s by Jed Perl, the longtime art critic for The New Republic and author of several previous books, whose writing I sometimes encounter in the NYRB. His use of the words “authority” and “freedom” is roughly analogous in our artform to “tradition” and “originality” or “creativity,” if by “tradition” we understand reference to the example of established masters and their ways of working (we could even say to their “wisdom,” or simply “expertise”), and he is concerned throughout with the interplay between this authority and the freedom of fresh creativity in the making, the artisanal crafting of art. Since his home base is in the fine arts and architecture—in objects of contemplation, for which the creator’s process of making is beginning, middle, and end—his arguments are a step removed from the arts of the act, for which the intervention of interpreters is required and the realization of a “work” involves not so much contemplation as an active transfer of energies. (He rather casually introduces the choreographer as a “maker.” But while it is true that a choreographer creates something “on” the dancers, he or she is doing that by interpreting an existing text—the music. A similar ‘tweener function is that of the cinematic auteur, who fashions the film and claims creator status, but works from a script that is really the generating element of the artwork. I don’t think I need to again underline the implications for our current habits of operatic production.) I am, though, enthusiastically with Perl’s plea to “release us from the stranglehold of relevance—from the insistence that works of art, whether classic or contemporary, are validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up with (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns.” Art, he argues, are in “a place apart.” They have their own rules of organization, not answerable to other concerns. “When we rush to label them—as radical, conservative, liberal, gay, straight, feminist, Black, or white—we may describe part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value” (my emphasis). Well said. The problem being, though, that so much art now presents itself pre-labeled, and has little or no “freestanding value” of its own.

And at the far left end of my shelf are three recent books: Bad News/How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, by Batyah Ungar-Sargon; The Diversity Delusion/How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald (the volume mentioned earlier); and Woke Racism/How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter. It has fascinated me to watch, over the past three or four years, a flock of politically engaged writers—all women save for Andrew Sullivan, prodded off the masthead of New York—who have flown the coop of center-left “legacy” media to take up insurgent positions somewhere along the rightward spectrum. They would include Bari Weiss, Sharyl Attkisson, and now Lara Logan. Ungar-Sargon is, so far as I can tell, still ensconced as Deputy Opinion Editor at Newsweek, a magazine I haven’t seen in so long I wouldn’t know what sort of opinion she may be deputy-editing, but which certainly has “legacy” status. Her book belongs in the “anti-anti” category with regard to race—by no means racist in the usual malevolent meaning we give that word,^(I) but against the assumption that anyone not antiracist in the all-encompassing activist sense is a white supremacist, and wary of the definition creep that draws whole new categories of attitudes and actions into the exclusively race-determined one that is grounds for excommunication from true-faith progressivism. She gives attention to a number of mainstream media sites (The New Yorker takes some merited and overdue lumps), but her special focus is on The New York Times, which she cites as a prime mover of the displacement of what she considers to be essentially a class conflict onto the convenient vehicle of race (she’s especially sharp on the relationship of the paper’s economic interests to the cultivated biases of its highly educated, well-heeled, smugly virtuous—and predominantly white—readership, a connection I haven’t seen as forcefully presented elsewhere). Her arguments are logically developed, specific, and firmly supported. We may grit our teeth at the notion that Donald Trump and his minions have been sometimes unfairly treated, but if it’s true, it’s true. And bias in the Times show itself baldly only from time to time, as in the deplorable Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed incident, ineptly handled from start to finish. It is usually present in the selection, positioning, and space allotment of stories (each, may I remind us, in place of another), and in the editing decisions of what’s included or not, what’s prominent and what isn’t within each story, what tone is taken, what subheads and photos, graphs and charts are chosen to accompany it. Ungar-Sargon is alert to all these.