Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

British and Danish artists have interpreted their countries’ participation in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya. Some of their works have attracted nationwide attention not least because of the focus given to wounded or dead soldiers. This differs from the official framing of the military operations where high-tech weaponry and targeted operations have reduced death and destruction to “collateral damage.” Some of these works have played a key role in the debate on the human costs of war, including how killed soldiers should be commemorated. In both countries, artists have addressed questions of political responsibility more directly and with a greater popular impact than parliamentary debates. There are a few examples of the opposite, of embedded artists mirroring the official version of the operations. This triggers the question of what an embedded artist actually sees and whether her or his work is any more authentic than paintings created far away from the war theaters. Finally, the role played by museum in raising popular awareness of what war entails will be addressed drawing upon examples from the Imperial War Museum (Britain) and the Museum of national History (Denmark).