Jed Perl on Arlene Croce

Arlene Croce and George Balanchine, 1981 (Photo by Dominique Nabokov)

It’s interesting to read about a view of art that totally differs from mine. Arlene Croce, New Yorker dance critic for twenty-three years (1973-1996), believed that art-making is the process by which raw experience is transformed into aesthetic experience. “Croce was perfectly willing to go to the theater and witness the most agonizing scenes of pain, suffering, and death, but only with the understanding that the ‘realism-idealism equation’ was engaged, that real life had in some way been transformed.” I’m quoting from Jed Perl’s wonderful tribute to Croce, “Echoes of Eternity,” in the March 27, 2025, The New York Review of Books. Perl’s defence of this view is curious. He writes,

You can disagree with Croce, but to do so you must argue that art is little more than a frame through which to observe the lives we’re living—or to launch theories or even polemics about the meaning of our lives. That’s the position of the social realists who dominated Soviet culture through the Stalinist years and of some in the arts community today, but Croce didn’t see it as a plausible approach for either an artist or an audience in a free society. 

Well, I disagree with Croce, but it has nothing to do with social realism or Soviet culture. It has everything to do with literary journalism, street photography, and documentary work. I relish art and writing that bring me as close to reality as possible. Show me life as is, warts and all. To hell with transformation. That’s for escapists and ballet fans.