Einræði, sviðslistir og menningarstofnanir | Tyranny, Performance and Cultural Institutions

The US President’s branding of the Kennedy Center with his name reveals that for a certain kind of politics, cultural institutions—opera houses, performance centers—do still matter. It reminds us of Marx’s critique of the coup d’etat of December 1851 of Louis Bonaparte, who would make himself Empereur Napoleon III: and of his Opera house, the Paris Opera: the redirecting of massive public funds for culture to shore up personal political power and glory. When his Empress asked the architect Charles Garnier, what name for the building’s style (Louis XV? Louis XVI?) he famously replied," no Madame: Napoleon III." While the American President takes a page from the French Empire, there are differences. 

In France, cultural institutions such as the Opera National de Paris are at the service of a cultural politics, often broader or bolder than any particular government, and deployed at national, regional and local levels, funded by taxpayer money. Because the Emperor had died before the Paris Opera opened, it has always been a French “Republican” institution. What lessons from the archive, and from the stage, allow us to hope that it is not for sale?

The genre of court ballet, which thrived in France from the late 16^th century until the 1660s and featured the king and select courtiers as performers, is understood as an instrument of royal power and control. This is exemplified during the reign of Louis XIV, who famously appeared as the rising sun at the end of the Ballet de la nuit (1653).  The political thrust of the so-called ‘burlesque’ ballets performed under Louis XIII – of which the Grand bal de la douairière de Billebahaut (1626) is a key example – is less clearcut.  Our ballet depicts the four parts of the world: ‘America’, ‘Asia’, ‘Europe’ and ‘The North’.  By controlling the narrative surrounding the (supposed) peoples of the world, the ballet ‘colonizes’ those peoples and perpetuates stereotypes about them.  It is, however, noteworthy to find the North, and specifically, Greenland, featured at all, and this portrayal is recorded in a full set of costume designs.  I will present and analyse the ballet’s characterization of the North as peculiar and, above all, icy.  Greenland has recently been characterized, similarly, as a mere “block of ice” in an attempt not just to control the narrative but also the land itself.

On the January 10, 2026 edition of his influential New York Times podcast, host Ezra Klein asked a pointed question: "why [do] fascist movements, authoritarian movements […] seem to care so much more about aesthetics and, in their own way, beauty, than" liberal democracies do? The issue of the tyrannic predilection for aesthetics and the wider relationship between political power and art have preoccupied modern thinkers from Walter Benjamin onwards, but, as Klein´s recent query shows, have become increasingly urgent in our present times. In this talk, I will explore this important relationship by comparing two performances of tyrannic power, Louis XIV´s 1662 royal entertainment Le Carrousel de Paris and U.S. President Trump´s September 2025 address to the assembled commanders of the American armed forces in Quantico, Virginia. While situated in vastly different historical contexts, both spectacles present uncanny similarities: they harness a similar aesthetics of mass domination yet paradoxically display hesitations and uncertainties signaling potential cracks in the tyrannic façade.