Laissez-faire aesthetics is the aesthetics that violates the very principle of art, because it insists that anything goes, when in fact the only thing that is truly unacceptable in the visual arts is the idea that anything goes.
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At times, amid the chic hedge-fund maelstrom of Art Basil Miami Beach, it could seem that what has died is the modernist century, with its vehement advocacy of certain aesthetic principles. Perhaps we have to accept that it has gone. But what is really in danger now is something much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the precious exclusivity of the high-art experience, which stretches from the Tanagra figurines and the Romanesque manuscripts to the paintings of Rembrandt and Poussin and Corot and Mondrian. When we contemplate them in all their particularity-in the almost delusional extremism of their varied visions and in the insistent singularity of their poetry-we are constantly reminded that high culture is anything but easygoing, that it is always daring, rightfully, triumphantly intolerant.
Jed Perl
