Is a picture worth a thousand votes?: aesthetic representation and democratic ideals

Contemporary approaches to political representation tend to prioritize empirical observations of established institutions. These contributions to contemporary political theory can be complemented by the work of historian Frank Ankersmit. Ankersmit proposes an aesthetic view of political representation that raises questions about the understanding of subjectivity in political representation. I argue that, by drawing upon notions of aesthetic judgment, Ankersmit suggests possibilities for conceptualizing political art within political representation. In this way, theories of representation can be developed to include a greater selection of forms of non-democratic representation as observed in the field.