Mateo Belgrano, Ph.D.

/ Arts and Democracy: Reconsidering Political Aesthetics in the 21st Century

The research examines the relationship between art and democracy against the backdrop of what Rancière called the “hatred of democracy.” Existing approaches tend to divide into two camps: those that conceive of art as a force for consensus, inclusion, and encounter—Dewey, Rancière, Bourriaud—and those that emphasize its conflictual or agonistic potential—Bishop, Rebentisch, Marchart. The research proposes a third position that moves beyond this binary.

The framework is built on a dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe. Arendt’s political reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment highlights the sensus communis and the role of imagination in enabling an “enlarged mentality”—the capacity to adopt the perspective of others and thus achieve consensus within a pluralism of viewpoints. Mouffe, however, criticizes this approach for eradicating real antagonism from democracy and producing a hegemonic consensus. Her agonistic model conceives of artistic practices not as seekers of consensus but as “agonistic interventions within the context of counter-hegemonic struggles.”

The central hypothesis is that these seemingly opposing positions actually share a common root: the power of imagination. Art enables us to imagine alternatives to a given world—its agonistic, critical dimension—but at the same time it allows us to imagine ourselves in the place of others, giving rise to consensus in its etymological sense: con-sensus, “feeling with” another. Rather than choosing between agonistic and ireneic art, we argue that artistic experience can be both at once—agonistic-ireneic: it involves confrontation while simultaneously enabling encounter and recognition. Imagining the new requires an understanding of the other in order to be communicable and meaningful; conversely, all consensus requires a certain amount of confrontation to avoid becoming complacent art. These two dimensions, grounded in imagination, are fundamental to sustaining a healthy and vigorous democracy.