The Aesthetics of Protest on Kyiv's Maidan: Reflections on Political Emergence and the Twenty-First-Century Crowd

Abstract:This essay argues that aesthetic works offer an understanding of the performativity of democratic protests and crowd action. It analyzes a handful of artworks from the Ukrainian Revolution of 2013–2014. The article demonstrates how aesthetic works express what may be termed political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together to change the political order. Aesthetic works enable an understanding of political emergence that is mostly unavailable to the social sciences, history, and journalism. The article contends that analysis of crowd action and twenty-first-century collective protest in particular would gain from theoretical and methodological efforts to conjoin social research and aesthetic analysis.