Must Art Obey?
A guest essay on art, protest, and liberalism
I apologize for the late publication friends. I returned from holiday and, as one does after a nine hour bus ride home, fell asleep promptly and did not wake up for half the day. I planned to share this lovely article with you, and have now published it.
Written by the creative and intrepid Corrine Hughes, it discusses the revolutionary qualities of arts of all mediums, why they are repressed by authoritarian regimes, and, in her words, discusses the “complexity of freedom again and, well, Russia.” and responds to one of my essays from a different lens. I found it both humbling and remarkable and implore you to read her work.
Liberty, Indeterminacy, and the Quiet Architecture of Acquiescence
The Professor’s essay, “Terrorizing Into Acquiescence,” returns us to Revolutionary France and asks what happens when liberty becomes spectacle, when the guillotine stands beneath the statue of Liberty, when violence is staged as purification, when terror operates not in contradiction to freedom but in its name. The essay is a warning: the rhetoric of liberty can conceal brutality; protection can become annihilation.
But my own research has led me to worry about something less theatrical and perhaps more durable: not terror as spectacle, but liberty as administration.
The Reign of Terror dramatized sovereign power. Its violence was theatrical, public, instructive. But my own research — first undertaken in 2013 as an undergraduate thesis titled Must Art Obey? Nationalism, Art, and Freedom in Hungary and Russia Today — led me to a quieter anxiety.
There were no guillotines in Moscow or Budapest in the mid-2000s.
No one claimed to oppose freedom — they claimed to defend it.
If the French Revolution revealed how liberty can preside over terror, Hungary and Russia revealed how liberty can survive rhetorically while its conditions narrow administratively.
I. Lefort and the Fear of the Empty Place
Claude Lefort’s account of democracy is indispensable here. In The Question of Democracy, he writes:
“The place of power becomes an empty place. Those who exercise power do not embody it; they do not appropriate it; they are only its temporary occupants.”
In premodern or totalitarian systems, power is incarnate — king, party, sovereign leader. In democracy, power is symbolically vacant. It is structured by contestation, by an absence that cannot be definitively filled.
This absence produces what Lefort calls a “radical in-determination”:
“Modern democracy institutes and preserves the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge.”
That dissolution is not failure. It is democratic vitality.
But indeterminacy is unsettling. It destabilizes identity. It refuses closure. It requires a population to tolerate ambiguity — about who “the people” are, what the nation represents, what values define it.
Nationalism answers that anxiety by filling the empty place.
In Hungary after 2010, constitutional reform under Viktor Orbán elevated the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) to constitutional status. Under Act CIX of 2011, the MMA became a public-law body responsible for distributing cultural funding and shaping institutional leadership. But membership was limited to artists affirming “unambiguous national sentiment.”
The reform was framed as restoring dignity and protecting Hungarian culture.
But Lefort warns us that when authority claims to embody the people substantively — when the symbolic emptiness is replaced with moral content — democracy shifts form.
Museums such as Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle) were transferred under MMA authority. Directors resigned. Artists formed protest groups and staged memorial actions outside institutional buildings — acts of mourning for a perceived death of autonomy.
No exhibitions were mass-burned. No artists were summarily executed. The terrain shifted. The empty place was administratively filled.
Art that complicated national narrative no longer appeared experimental. It appeared destabilizing — not illegal, but misaligned.
Indeterminacy narrowed.
II. Berlin and the Moral Seduction of Unity
Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty clarifies how such narrowing can be justified.
Negative liberty: freedom from interference.
Positive liberty: the freedom to realize one’s “true” or collective self.
Berlin cautions that the language of positive liberty carries risk:
“I may conceive myself as something wider than the individual… as a social whole of which I am an element. This entity may be identified as the ‘real’ or ‘higher’ self… and it may be said that it is this self which must be liberated.”
When the “higher self” becomes the nation, dissent can be reframed as pathology. Coercion becomes emancipation.
The Sakharov Center trial in Moscow embodied this tension. In 2003, the exhibition “Осторожно, религия!” (“Beware, Religion!”) opened at the Andrei Sakharov Center, featuring contemporary artworks critically engaging religion’s growing political role. Orthodox activists vandalized the exhibition.
Yet the state prosecuted not only the vandals but the curators — Yuri Samodurov and Lyudmila Vasilovskaya — under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code (“incitement of religious hatred”).
The Russian Constitution’s Article 44 guarantees freedom of artistic creativity. But Article 282 expanded the definition of harm. Protecting religious feeling became protecting national moral unity.
Berlin warned against belief in a “final solution” — the idea that social contradictions can be permanently resolved through coherent unity. Once unity becomes sacred, sacrifice becomes conceivable.
The guillotine is one form of sacrifice. The courtroom is another.
In both cases, liberty is invoked.
III. Foucault and the Disappearance of Spectacle
The Professor’s essay centers terror — spectacular, public, exemplary.
But Michel Foucault reminds us that modern power often abandons spectacle in favor of normalization.
In Discipline and Punish, he contrasts the public execution of Damiens in 1757 with the rise of disciplinary regimes. Sovereign power once “manifested itself in its dazzling display.” Modern power, by contrast, becomes diffused.
Foucault writes:
“The disappearance of torture as a public spectacle marks the end of a certain mechanism of power… It is no longer a question of punishing less, but of punishing better.”
And further:
“Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”
In Russia, the Sakharov trial did not annihilate art. It produced a new category: art as potential extremism.
In Hungary, constitutional restructuring did not abolish artistic expression. It produced a new domain: nationally aligned art as normative.
Power did not terrify publicly. It defined administratively. And when power defines, fear becomes anticipatory. Artists calculate. Curators reconsider. Institutions internalize. No guillotine is necessary.
IV. The Artist Who Reintroduced Spectacle
Yet spectacle did not disappear entirely.
In 2013, Pyotr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to Red Square in front of the Kremlin in a performance titled Fixation. Earlier he had sewn his mouth shut in solidarity with Pussy Riot. Later he set fire to the doors of the FSB headquarters.
If the state preferred normalization, Pavlensky answered with extremity. He staged the body as indictment and reintroduced sovereign drama. But the state did not execute him. It charged him with hooliganism and processed him administratively.
Foucault’s insight becomes unavoidable: even extremity can be absorbed into disciplinary procedure. The spectacle belonged to the artist, while normalization belonged to the state.
V. Institutions and Visibility
Boris Groys argues that art institutions determine visibility. The museum, he writes, “reflects the dominant social conventions and power structures.” It is not neutral; it frames what counts as contemporary and legitimate.
When Hungary restructured its art institutions, it restructured visibility. When Russia prosecuted the Sakharov Center, it redefined harm.
The word “freedom” survived in constitutional language, but operationally changed and very much narrowed.
VI. 2013: Nascent Fear
When I wrote my thesis in 2013, Putin had just returned to the presidency. Orbán’s constitutional changes were fresh. Artists protested in Budapest. Russian curators were on trial. Pavlensky’s act shocked global audiences. It felt unsettling yet reversible.
In my self-evaluation that year, I wrote that I struggled “to form an opinion on nationalism versus freedom.” I believed I was studying the construction and deconstruction of boundaries. Now I think I was studying fear.
Russia has now been at war with Ukraine for over a decade. Hungary’s institutional transformations are entrenched. What I studied as emergent hardened into regime structure.
The Professor warns that terror can produce acquiescence. I would add that normalization can do so more quietly — and perhaps more durably.
Acquiescence does not always feel like terror. It often feels like order, stability, even common sense.
Lefort reminds us that democracy survives only as long as the empty place remains empty. The question is not only whether liberty is invoked violently. It is whether we can endure its indeterminacy.
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983.
Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1969.
Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. Sage Publications, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Vintage, 1977.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. MIT Press, 2008.
Kline, Edward. “Art on Trial: the Case of Samodurov, Vasilovskaya and Mikhalchuk.” Sakharov Center, 2005.
Lefort, Claude. “The Question of Democracy.” In Democracy and Political Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Hungary. Act CIX of 2011 on the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Russian Federation. Criminal Code, Article 282.
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