ART, POWER AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE — “ART IS NOT A MIRROR TO REFLECT REALITY, BUT A HAMMER TO SHAPE IT”
Art can not only be used to represent political power, but can also serve, above all, as a rejoinder against established power relations, accompanied by social critique. In this context, art can then be understood as the materialization of the “will to power” (Friedrich Nietzsche): on one hand, when the powerful use it for their own ends; on the other, when the powerful are confronted and challenged by the use of art for purposes of social critique. A famous example would be Diego Rivera’s murals in the National Palace of Mexico City.
Art is controversial, and both its interpretation and its aesthetic evaluation are influenced by power interests. On the other hand, the critical potential and power effect of works of art rest on the fact that they open broad spaces of interpretation and can be understood on different symbolic levels. Thus, for example, there are works of art that can bring together contradictory meanings and fuse them into a unity of sense. Owing to their fundamental interpretive diversity, an active and ongoing reception of works of art is necessary for them to remain alive (Georg Simmel); that is, the continuous interpretation of both the general public and art experts is required for the aesthetic-symbolic impact of the works to unfold its full potential over time.
The symposium aims, from an interdisciplinary perspective and with a focus on artistic phenomena—not only in the Latin American context—to discuss the relationship between art, power and social critique. We are interested in analyzing concrete expressions that show how art is capable of challenging the powerful. We invite proposals for papers that bring together sociological, philosophical, critical theory, gender studies, racial studies and postcolonial studies perspectives, among others, to investigate how hierarchies of power are confronted through art.
