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.
The Reinvention of Art?
See also: a polemic by Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review.
https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth