Museums Around the Country Explore Democracy

This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.

It’s always nice to put a face to a name, and visitors to the new exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — “Power of the People: Art and Democracy” — will have an opportunity to do just that.

They will be greeted at the entrance by a perhaps-unfamiliar representation of a well-recognized name. You know his method, now meet the man, or at least a roughly 10-inch-tall, marble bust of him cast sometime between 170-195 A.D.

Socrates.

His presence at the Foster Gallery is a reminder that, while this exhibition is being staged during the presidential election season, it is not just about American democracy, and not even modern Western democracy. It tells the story of our representative form of government and how artists have interpreted it.

According to Plato, his student Socrates was skeptical about democracy. He worried about its vulnerability to tyrants, but he still preferred it to tyranny. “His nuanced critical thinking with respect to democracy’s strengths and weaknesses is precisely why I selected him to introduce the exhibit,” said Phoebe Segal, the museum’s Mary Bryce Comstock curator of Greek and Roman art.

The museum’s presentation on the art of democratic societies through the ages is not the only exhibition this fall pegged to the presidential election.