A brief excerpt from the fourth chapter of Jed Perl's new book, Authority and Freedom, A Defense of the Arts (which might be available from your local public library).
Just about anything that's been felt or thought can fuel a work of art: hopes, dreams, passions, beliefs, principles, predilections, uncertainties, fears, even prejudices. There are many other areas of human experience and endeavor where these same forces are in play. But life in a civil society nearly always demands compromises and accommodations.
We adjust our most ardent ideas and emotions as we reach for consensus. Creative spirits, although by no means immune to the social and political forces that shape their time, aren't consensus builders--at least not in any direct way. Because the work that artists do is detached from so much of what we think of as ordinary human activity and action--they're able to reimagine our ideas and experiences in an intensified, concentrated, and hyperbolic form.
There's a sense in which all creative spirits are extremists.
That helps explain why, for centuries, popes and princes were so interested in cultivating the work of painters, sculptors, authors, and composers.
They recognized the unique, perhaps otherworldly impact of these achievements that stand apart from life's compromises, conflicts, and intrigues. A statue or poem honoring a god or a hero, precisely because it's immune to life's ordinary pressures, can have an impact unlike anything else on earth. -- Authority and Freedom, pgs 72, 73, by Jed Perl
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