Oliver Wunsch is Associate Professor of Art History at Boston College, where he specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. He is the author of A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, which addresses how the emergence of consumer capitalism in eighteenth-century France transformed the relationship between art, time, and value.
Oliver Wunsch’s fellowship project is Aesthetic Redemption: Art, Race, and Secular Salvation in Eighteenth-Century France. This book examines how Enlightenment aesthetics redefined theological concepts of grace and redemption through depictions of Black subjects. Aesthetic Redemption originates in a paradox: eighteenth-century French critics frequently admired depictions of Black subjects in art while disparaging Black people in life. Art critics and theorists reconciled this apparent contradiction through a secular rhetoric of redemption, according to which art was defined by the power to ameliorate allegedly deficient subjects. Many of the artworks at the center of this discourse strike viewers as sensitive portrayals of their subjects, yet the salvational language deployed by audiences at the time reveals the limits of these seemingly positive messages. The aesthetics of redemption granted artists license to forgo stereotypes in their work without necessarily contradicting the biases and assumptions of viewers. This simultaneous distancing from and maintenance of racial prejudice points to a broader tension in the modern understanding of artistic liberty, which granted artists quasi-sacred powers within their work while calling into question their authority to alter ideas beyond the confines of a picture’s frame.