Bad Government: Art and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

How did art, architecture, and visual and material culture in the long eighteenth century perpetuate or resist objectionable forms of government? This panel will consider how the arts were weaponized both by political leaders to shore up their regimes and by their critics to bring those regimes down. Potential topics include but are by no means limited to: the arts of the eighteenth century’s revolutions and counterrevolutions, the enlistment of the visual arts to justify, perpetuate, and resist colonialism, popular media and propaganda, the building and destruction of palaces, monuments, and other public-facing forms of art, artists as political actors, private and domestic forms of artistic control and contestation, portraits of rulers and political figures, sacred art in the service of secular struggles, and the mobilization of scientific illustration for political ends.