Career
Jed Perl initially trained as a painter. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia College and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. [2] He decided to devote himself fully to criticism in the mid-1980s. "In my twenties I was very involved in making art as well as writing about art," he said an interview, "but in the early 80s I came to what I guess I would describe as a fork in the road, and around 1985 I just decided to stop painting. A lot of people were not that surprised, they felt that’s where I was going." [3]
Perl became one of the art critics at The New Criterion soon after its founding in 1982. [3] From there he went on to editorial appointments at Art and Antiques , Salamagundi , Vogue , and Modern Painters before joining The New Republic in 1994. [2] His essays have appeared there regularly since then. [4]
Perl is the former Chairman of the Board of the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, which is dedicated to the preservation and study of the art of John Heliker and Robert LaHotan and the maintenance of their former home on Great Cranberry Island, Maine as an artist residency. [5] He was a friend of Heliker's and wrote the foreword for the catalogue of the exhibition "John Heliker: Drawing on the New Deal, 1932-1948" which originated at Stephen F. Austin State University in 2011. [6] [7] [8]
Perl teaches at the New School for Social Research. [3] [9] His two-volume biography of Alexander Calder was published in 2017 and 2020. [10] [11]
"Laissez-faire aesthetics"
Perl is a longtime critic of what he sees as financially driven compromise of artistic standards among artists, collectors, galleries, and museums. He coined the phrase laissez-faire aesthetics to describe this phenomenon in a 2007 essay for The New Republic that became the introduction for his 2012 book Magicians and Charlatans.
Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money - a new attitude, now pervasive in the upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics. The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now - think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes - believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously. ... My problem, I now realize, is not only that I am looking for consistency, it is that I persist in imagining that there is such a thing as inconsistency. The paintings by Currin and Yuskavage that are now going for hundreds of thousands of dollars are engineered for an audience that believes that a work of art can satisfy radically disparate and even contradictory attitudes and appetites, and satisfy them consecutively or concurrently - it hardly matters. A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be. [12]
Edward M. Gomez, reviewing Magicians and Charlatans for Hyperallergic in 2014, wrote, "even if Perl had published only this new book’s introduction ('Laissez-faire Aesthetics') as a pamphlet, it still could have served as something of a manifesto calling for a drastic reconsideration of the art world’s current methods and mores. It’s something of a cri de coeur from a well-informed observer who is deeply disappointed that dollar-value concerns have trumped aesthetic considerations of so much of what comes up for consumption in galleries and venerable museums." [13]
Laissez-faire is a type of economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism. As a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the following axioms: "the individual is the basic unit in society, i.e., the standard of measurement in social calculus; the individual has a natural right to freedom; and the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system." The original phrase was laissez faire, laissez passer, with the second part meaning "let (things) pass". It is generally attributed to Vincent de Gournay.
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.
The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School landscapes, modernist masterpieces and contemporary works, as well as collections of early American furniture and decorative arts.
Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander (Sandy) Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. It was broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and adapted into a book of the same name.
Hilton Kramer was an American art critic and essayist.
Jeffrey Albert Tucker is an American libertarian writer, publisher, entrepreneur and advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin.
Donald Kuspit is an American art critic and poet, known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism. He has published on the subjects of avant-garde aesthetics, postmodernism, modern art, and conceptual art.
Jean Hélion was a French painter whose abstract work of the 1930s established him as a leading modernist. His midcareer rejection of abstraction was followed by nearly five decades as a figurative painter. He was also the author of several books and an extensive body of critical writing.
Louisa Matthíasdóttir was an Icelandic-American painter.
Klaus Gunther Perls (1912–2008) was born in Berlin, Germany, where his parents were art dealers. He studied art history in Munich, but after the Nazis stopped granting degrees to Jews he moved to Basel, Switzerland and completed his studies. Here, he wrote a dissertation on the 15th-century French painter Jean Fouquet.
The Eakins Press Foundation is an American publishing house based in New York established by Leslie George Katz in 1966 and named after the painter Thomas Eakins. Since its founding in 1966, the Eakins Press Foundation has published some of the classic volumes on American art and photography, including Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument, Walker Evans’s Message from the Interior, and Lincoln Kirstein’s definitive monograph on Elie Nadelman.
Leland Bell was an American painter.
Thornton Willis is an American abstract painter. He has contributed to the New York School of painting since the late 1960s. Viewed as a member of the Third Generation of American Abstract Expressionists, his work is associated with Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Process Art, Postminimalism, Bio-morphic Cubism and Color Field painting.
Samuel M. Kootz was a New York City art dealer and author whose Kootz Gallery was one of the first to champion Abstract Expressionist Art.
The original Decor for Satie's "Socrate" was designed by mobile artist Alexander Calder for a touring performance of Erik Satie’s symphonic drama Socrate in 1936. It was a mobile set considered by Virgil Thomson as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century theatre design. It consisted of three elements: a red disc, interlocking steel hoops, and a vertical rectangle, black on one side and white on the other, against a blue backdrop. Destroyed in a fire in 1936, the decor was recreated by Walter Hatke in 1976 for a performance in New York.
Autumn Rhythm is a 1950 abstract expressionist painting by American artist Jackson Pollock in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The work is a distinguished example of Pollock's 1947-52 poured-painting style, and is often considered one of his most notable works.
Franklin Einspruch is an American artist and writer based in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.
Adrien Alexandre Voisin (1890–1979), was an American sculptor. He was known for his bronze work, and had been one of the lead architectural sculptors at Hearst Castle.
