Art

This chapter takes seriously Blake’s annotation that art articulates, even directs empires. According to Nicholas Thomas, ‘colonialism has always been a cultural process; its discoveries and processes are imagined and energized through signs, metaphors and narratives; even what would seem its purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by structures of meaning’.1 Despite the emphasis on colonial ideology, race and Orientalism, the fraught and complex relations between art and empire have been until very recently a relatively marginal concern (at best an annotation) for both historical studies and art history.2 Yet artists, artworks and cultural institutions generated, endorsed, criticised and resisted imperial projects: as such, they highlighted the problematic agency and genealogy of both colonialism and the category of art.