Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 28

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Introductory Remarks 1
Figure 1: Exhibition view. Courtesy Queens Museum, New York.
A
rt and culture scholars tend to agree with the idea that art practices can play a role
in expanding ongoing political debates. However, detailed analyses of such a con-
tribution remain rare, especially within the literature on art and international af-
fairs. Indeed, while there are several academic studies of the intersection between art and
politics focused on specific regions (e.g. Selz and Landauer 2006; Kane 2013), historical
moments (e.g. Frascina 1999; Lobel 2009; Kidd 2014; Golan 1995) and specific types
of art practices (e.g. as a form of political resistance in daily life, Clements 2016) or that
consider the theoretical underpinnings of the two disciplines (e.g. Harris 2007; Gielen
2015), the overlaps between art and international affairs remain understudied. Among
the exceptions to this are publications such as Designing UNESCO: Art, Architecture and
International Politics at Mid-Century, a historiography of the headquarters of UNESCO
(Pearson 2017), as well as discussions on and around soft power (e.g. Watanabe and
McConnell 2008; Carles 2016; Nisbett 2016; Lord and Blankenberg 2015) and cultural
diplomacy (e.g. Harper 2012; Mikkonen and Suutari 2015; Hampel 2017).
This article aims to contribute to expanding knowledge regarding the intersection be-
tween those two fields of knowledge. It does so in a way that is broadly aligned with the
1
I am thankful to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for financing my doctoral
research, which included part of the analysis presented in this article (Dâmaso 2017). I must also thank
Dr Jorella Andrews, Dr Bernadette Buckley, Dr Debbie Lisle and the anonymous reviewer for their
insightful comments on an earlier version of this text as well as Pedro Reyes for providing me access to
several documents related to pUN. Finally, I thank the Queens Museum for allowing me to use images of
the project free of charge.
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