The Reinvention of Art?

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts is, among other things, a 140-page subtweet.

In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat. The idea of the work of art as an imaginative achievement to which the audience freely responds is now too often replaced by the assumption that a work of art should promote a particular idea or ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.

Perl does not provide supporting evidence, or explain how being “data- and metrics-obsessed” relates to the politicization of art. The only authority he cites on behalf of the trend he opposes is Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924). Though Trotsky later defended “complete freedom for art,” he did so “because the artist could not ‘serve the struggle for freedom’—the revolutionary struggle—‘unless he subjectively assimilates its social content.’” Perl writes:

To this day this idea—…