About twenty years ago, at the Harvard Kennedy School, Warren Bennis, David Gergen, and I co-taught a course titled “Leadership and Art.” Though for various reasons we offered it only once, I recall it as a wonderful experiment, equally enjoyed by faculty and students.
The course came to mind again yesterday when I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a current exhibit, “Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art.” It reminded me again – if I needed reminding, which I did not – of how leadership and art are frequently, deeply, entwined. For so much art – visual, literary, auditory; from film to fiction; historical or contemporaneous – mirrors our own infinitely more mundane obsession with power.
The Maya art now on display at the Met was crafted (A.D. 250-900) by master artists who, presumably, were ordered to depict the power of power. Their work weaves together the sacred and the secular in visualizations that, most memorably, are horrifying. In fact, this exhibit was an intellectual as well as visceral reminder of how “bad leadership,” in this case leadership intended to intimidate, is as old as the human condition.
Maya artists seemed to fixate on and excel at depicting gods and goddesses who had aggressive, warlike personalities. To be sure, the beautiful and benevolent are also in evidence, especially as they relate to fertility and fecundity. Moreover, sometimes the younger and weaker, followers, overcome the older and stronger, leaders.
But in the main, this Met show is a superbly imagined advertisement for the exercise of unabashed, unmitigated power. Power, if necessary, through the exercise of force. Power, if necessary, through human sacrifice: “ritualistic, dominion-fortifying public torture and killing, usually of political prisoners.”*
Lest this all seem dated, relevant to the distant past but not to the immediate present, it is not. It was only yesterday that Vice President Kamala Harris publicly accused Russia of committing “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine. So much for art, including ancient art, consigned to the side.
——————————————————–