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"I found myself shedding tears in front of his 1784 history painting The Oath of the Horatii -an allegory of the virtues of fidelity and sacrificing oneself to a greater cause, produced by a future Jacobin on the eve of the French Revolution as an endorsement of Republicanism. Looking back, I wonder if I was not only lamenting the withering of civic ideals (and of post-Reagan civics education) in America, but also mourning David's conviction that visual art matters in the making of the world."

"As philosopher of aesthetics Jonathan Gilmore has noted, for five of the six decades during which France implemented strict censorship laws in the nineteenth century, the government "censored drawings in advance of publication, but not the printed word"-as if the crayon were mightier than the pen.* The supreme irony is that while many in the arts have since lost our conviction in art's ability to affect material change, the far right has not:"

Viewing Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii evokes mourning for waning civic ideals and for the belief that visual art can shape the world. Nineteenth-century French censorship prioritized suppressing images over printed words, indicating the perceived material power of visual media. The far right continues to use public art and symbolic projects to exert influence, exemplified by proposals like a National Garden of American Heroes and removal of rainbow sidewalks. Recent U.S. political actions disbanded cultural advisory bodies, attacked institutions such as the Smithsonian, and physically altered symbolic architecture, revealing an aggressive, politicized assault on culture and marginalized communities.

Read at Artforum