Ever since Plato famously proposed to banish poets and their ‘embellished tales’ from his ideal Republic, the relationship between art and politics has been strained. On the negative end of the spectrum hovers the warning example of a failed Austrian landscape painter who proceeded to push the world into total war. What makes things even worse is that the remarkable appeal of Hitler’s ghastly vision in 1930s Germany owed much to the efforts of sympathetic artists such as Leni Riefenstahl or Gottfried Benn. But even more inspiring figures on the positive end of the spectrum – Václav Havel and Melina Mercouri come to mind here – usually fall from popular grace once they accept political office.

            For this reason, prominent artists often abjure political engagement, fearing, like Nobel Laureates Gao Xingjian and Orhan Pamuk, that art loses its essence when conscripted into the service of politics. Many politicos, too, shudder at the thought of ‘aesthetic politics’, seeing it as a Frankenstein-like hybrid born of irrational impulses and the utopian pipedream of establishing societal models based on beauty, harmony or, worst of all, the ‘sublime’. The same goes for the guardians of ‘value-free’ political science dedicated to the pursuit of objective, ‘law-like’ knowledge in the social realm. In fact, even those international relations experts who recognise the pivotal role of language and symbols in the construction of political ‘reality’ ultimately insist that poetry, literature, and other forms of aesthetic expression are incapable of solving today’s global problems such as worldwide financial crises, transnational terrorism, North-South inequality, and global climate change. As Alexander Wendt, an academic superstar of world politics, recently put it, ‘If we want to solve those problems our best hope, slim as it may be, is social science’.