What is art? Jed Perl—the Alexander Calder biographer, New Republic art critic, and early New Criterion contributor—offers his answer to the perennial question in his new book, really an extended essay, Authority and Freedom.

All art, Perl argues—across all genres and all times—is a fight between tradition and innovation. For something to be art, its maker must have mastered the technique and the craft of the tradition he is working in, but he must then go beyond that and make his own innovations. Without that freedom, the work is not art; it is merely craft. But without the necessary grounding in the traditions of its genre, the work disintegrates into nothingness.

For Perl these rules are true for everything from classical sculpture and medieval illuminated manuscripts to Mozart’s sonatas and the singing of Aretha Franklin. To quote Perl,

For the artist it’s never enough that the work is well made. The well-made work is the work that acknowledges the authority of a tradition and does nothing more. The artist must engage with the freedom that’s possible within that tradition, so that making becomes an exploration of how things have been made in the past and involves some element of remaking—not replicating or reproducing but evaluating what has already been done and then making adjustments, whether large or small.

This is the central message of Perl’s essay.

Perl emphasizes both the innovation in the art of earlier times, which is often