The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia

The 2021 Capitol Hill Riot marked a watershed moment when the ’old world’ of factbased systems of representation was briefly overwhelmed by the emerging hyper-individual politics of aestheticized emotion. In The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Kit Messham-Muir and Uros Cvoro analyse the aesthetics that have emerged at the core of 21st-century politics, and which erupted at the US Capitol in January 2021. Looking at this event’s aesthetic dimensions through such aspects as QAnon, white resentment and strongman authoritarianism, they examine the world-wide historical trends towards ethno-nationalism and populism that emerged following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the dawning of the current post-ideological age.

Building on their ground-breaking research into how trauma, emotion and empathy have become well-worn tropes in contemporary art informed by conflict, Messham-Muir and Cvoro go further by highlighting the ways in which art can actively disrupt an underlying drift in society towards white supremacism and ultranationalism. Utilising their outsiders’ perspective on a so-called American phenomenon, and rejecting American exceptionalism, their theorising of the ’Trump Effect’ rejects the idea of Trump as a political aberration, but as a symptom of deeper and longer-term philosophical shifts in global politics and society.

As theorists of contemporary art and visual culture, Messham-Muir and Cvoro explore the ways in which these features of the Trump Effect operate through aesthetics, in the intersection of politics and contemporary art, and provide valuable insight into the current political context.

Uros Cvoro is Associate Professor in Art Theory at UNSW Australia, Arts, Design & Architecture. His research interests include contemporary art and politics, cultural representations of nationalism, post-socialist and post-conflict art. His books include Transitional Aesthetics: Art at The Edge of Europe (2018) and Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (2014). With Kit Messham-Muir, he is co-author of Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Kit Messham-Muir is Professor in Art in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. His research interests include the art and visual culture of war, as well as the studio practice of contemporary artists. With Uros Cvoro, he is co-author of Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021) and author of Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (2015).