Jed Perl: Cultural Charisma: True and False

Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 27, 2026 In the arts—whether literary, visual, musical, or theatrical—charisma is an exuberance or exhilaration, a sense that a work of art or an artist has taken a large or original place in the world, so large and original that ordinary measurements of good, very good, even great prove inadequate. Cultural charisma has its origins in ancient ideas about inspiration. But in the arts inspiration must be cultivated, developed. The real cultural charisma is grounded in craft—in the basics of an art form. In our media saturated world there’s also a false cultural charisma, untethered from craft—a charisma that suggests Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as “the spirit of extravagance.” In thinking about the real and false cultural charisma I’ll touch on the ideas of Giorgio Vasari, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry James, and look at creative spirits including Katherine Anne Porter, George Balanchine, Suzanne Farrell, Sean Connery, and Andy Warhol. Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include New Art City (2005), Antoine’s Alphabet (2008), Magicians and Charlatans (2012), Paris Without End (2014), a two-volume biography of Alexander Calder (2017/2020), and, most recently, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (2022). Perl was a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade and the art critic at The New Republic for twenty years.