The Aesthetics of Protest on Kyiv’s Maidan: Reflections on Political Emergence and the Twenty-First Century Crowd Abstract This essay argues that aesthetic works offer an understanding of the performativity of democratic protests and crowd action. To substantiate the argument, it analyzes a handful of artworks from the Ukrainian Revolution 2013–2014: posters by Strayk-Plakat, films by Babylon 13, Matviy Vaisberg's The Wall, and the aesthetic symbolism of the so-called Heavenly Hundred. More generally, the article demonstrates how aesthetic works express what may be termed political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Aesthetics works enable an understanding of political emergence that is mostly unavailable to the social sciences, history, and journalism. For these reasons, the article contends, analysis of crowd action and twenty-first collective protest in particular would gain from theoretical and methodological efforts to conjoin social research and aesthetic analysis.