Journée d’études : “Art and Power : Patronage and Politics in Europe from the Old Regime to the Present”.

René Antoine Houasse, Louis XIV à cheval, fin du XVIIe siècle, huile sur toile, 255 x 200 cm, Versailles, musée national de Versailles et de Trianon.

Type : journée d’étude.
Date et heure : 23 février février 2018 à 9h.
Lieu : Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa St, Stanford, CA 94305.

This conference examines the history of state arts patronage in Europe and its ramifications in the present. Presentations on literature, music, theater, and the visual arts will provide an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and the tensions underlying the European model of state arts funding, along with a contemporary perspective on how and why European governments seek to support the arts today by the Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the United States. The panels will address questions such as: How have the arts been used to secure domestic political legitimacy or project power internationally at different times? What kinds of art are deemed worthy of support, and what artistic forms have been excluded from such patronage? What are the different historical genealogies of this state patronage, and what do they tell us about why Europe remains committed to centralized state funding of the arts when that of the United States is wavering?

RSVP: andreip@stanford.edu

Programme

vendredi 23 février 2018

9am
Introduction: Dan Edelstein

9:15-10:45am
Panel 1: Representations of Power in the Old Regime

Sarah Grandin (Harvard University)
“‘To Preserve and Augment’: Printing the Cabinet du Roi, 1670”

Chandra Mukerji (UCSD)
“Meaning vs. Imagination in the Art of the Sun King: Sculpture, themes, and political possibility”

Gerardo Tocchini (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice)
“The Aristocratic Romance: Greuze’s ‘Bourgeois’ Scenes”

11am-12:30pm
Panel 2: Patronage, Circulation, and Institutions

Rahul Markovits (École Normale Supérieure)
“Actors of soft power: French theatre and the paradoxes of cultural grandeur in eighteenth-century Europe”

Audrey Calefas-Strebelle (Mills College)
“Turkish and French delights: From Turkish origin to French manufacture, the circulation of artefacts and savoir faire in French-Ottoman cultural diplomacy”

Andrei Pesic (Stanford)
“Patronage on the Cheap: Monopolies and Enlightenment Cultural Markets”

2-3:00pm
Art and Power Today: France’s Cultural Policy.
Presentation and Discussion

Bénédicte de Montlaur (French Embassy in the U.S.) in conversation with Matthew Tiews (Stanford Arts Initiative)

3:15-4:45pm
Panel 3: After the Revolution: Rethinking Art and Power in the New Regime

Robert Morrissey (University of Chicago)
“Enlightenment and Liminality: Mme de Staël, Victim as Arbiter of Taste and Glory”

Anne Higonnet (Barnard College of Columbia University)
“Sumptuary law failure, fashion magazine success”

Heather Hadlock (Stanford)
“Verdi’s Aida from Italian tourist to French resident: Paris, 1876-1880”

Organizers : Dan Edelstein and Andrei Pesic