The show consists of 180 items, almost own from the MFA’s permanent collection. They include ceramics, posters, textiles, paintings, coins, sculptures, photographs, clothing, even a sundial. It dates from the French Revolution, and very handsome it is, too, though handsomeness is, at best, an incidental consideration here.

Those items range in date from the 5th century BCE to 2022. Although most are from the United States, others are from ancient Greece and Rome, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Argentina. “All over the map” isn’t just a figure of speech.

The show’s curators are the MFA’s Phoebe Segal and Patrick Murphy, curators, respectively, of classical art, and of prints and drawings. There was additional input from curators in other departments, as well as several high school and college interns. So think of “Power of the People” as being all over the MFA map: e pluribus museum. Clearly, it was conceived and executed as a group effort, a concept that is, of course, inherently democratic.

A silver “Sons of Liberty Bowl” executed by Paul Revere in 1768 is in the same gallery as a Greek drinking cup from 5th century BCE. (Revere makes a second appearance, with his familiar engraving of the Boston Massacre. Missing from the image is a Black man, Crispus Attucks, who was among those killed by British soldiers. Bob Tomolillo’s 2020 version, included in the show, rectifies that omission.)

An anti-slavery badge from 1863 evokes democracy extended. Just 2 inches long, it shares the same gallery as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s “Tribal Map,” from 2000, which measures 7½ feet by 10 feet. A mixed-media work on canvas, it evokes democracy denied, showing the contiguous 48 states, and parts of northern Mexico and southern Canada, with the superimposed names not of states or provinces but the Indigenous peoples who live or lived there.

The show is divided into three parts: the Promise of Democracy, the Practice of Democracy, and the Preservation of Democracy. Those designations do seem more porous than not. Preservation, for example, includes sections devoted to art and activism and freedom of the press. Might those fall just as well under the headings of Promise or Practice? That said, some of the works take on an added power when seen in terms of the part of the show they’re in. Jim Dow’s photograph of a dozen empty jurors’ chairs in a Georgia courthouse is as eloquent as anything to be seen here, and its presence within Practice underscores that eloquence.

There are works here by some famous names, and they come from all over the art-historical map: Albrecht Dürer, Andy Warhol, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Honoré Daumier, Jean-François Millet, Richard Hamilton, Richard Serra, Norman Rockwell, Shepard Fairey, Martin Puryear, Saul Steinberg, Barbara Kruger.

Far more works are by unknown artists, which is as it should be. Aesthetic concerns are nearly always secondary here. Art is about means, how something is done — its manner, its quality, its formal properties — and the execution of that “how” determines the estimation of a work’s merit. Democracy is altogether different. It’s about the pursuit of ends: justice, equality, order, freedom, the list goes on. That those ends can be in opposition to each other is part of the messiness and frustration of democracy.

There’s a further contradiction: Art is inherently elitist. Museums are predicated on the belief that some art is superior to other art — otherwise, why go to the great bother and expense of collecting, preserving, and displaying certain works? Yet elitism (at least in principle) is anathema to democracy.

That contradiction can be problematic. The sincerity of the creators of the several dozen political posters in the show is never to be doubted. Their artistry, however, often is. Polemical passion can be aesthetically counter-productive. Aesthetic considerations are hardly relevant, or shouldn’t be. It’s a given that ends prevail over means. It’s the rare artist who can honor the imperatives of both art and polemic. The supreme example may be Goya. Here the best example is Daumier (it helps that he understood so well the polemical utility of humor).

Conversely, a lack of engagement can be even more problematic than an excess of it. Politically engaged Warhol was not; and a 1964 screenprint of racial conflict in Alabama feels worse than just going through the motions — worse, because Warhol is so much less interested in civil rights than he is Marilyn or Liz or Elvis or even Campbell’s Soup cans. The print is as empty as Andy’s toupee without Andy’s head in it.

A related issue is specificity. Inevitably, so many of the posters are conceptual. Their job is to render the abstract visual. The limitations this can impose become plain when looking at the photographs in the show. Their overwhelming specificity lends them an impact and immediacy the posters simply can’t rival. The clearest example is both the most horrifying and the one that hits closest to home — “home” meaning in this case City Hall Plaza. It’s Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image of a young white man using an American flag to attack a Black man who’s being held in place by another young white man. This was 1976, America’s bicentennial year, and also the third year of court-ordered desegregation in Boston.

Specificity is a defense, by no means foolproof, against the vagaries of argumentation and how slippery it can be. The most famous posters on display are a set of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms,” from 1943. In their own way, they are as much a part of our collective democratic consciousness as the Capitol or the topography at Gettysburg.

Yet looked at with 21st-century eyes, one sees something alongside Rockwell’s graphic skill, the depth of feeling, and nobility of sentiment. It’s how, with a tweaking of the text, a translation of that text into German, and the use of a Fraktur font, one might easily imagine how these images of upright, mostly Nordic-looking people would have appeared no less upright — there’s no polite way to put this — on posters in Nuremberg in 1943. We hold these truths to be self-evident, but what happens when others consider those truths to be propaganda?

That’s where the hard work of democracy comes in, with both Promise and Preservation deferring to Practice. It’s silly to speak of a defining work in so rich and expansive a show as “Power of the People.” But reviewers are prone to such silliness. So give that title to Paul Shambroom’s photograph of a Louisiana village council meeting in 2002. It looks rather boring, actually, but that’s the point. So much of democracy is just that, boring. That was as true in Maurice, La., 22 years ago as it was in Athens 2500 years ago. Dailiness meets democracy — dailiness is democracy — and as with the specificity of photography, the specificity of mundane actions insures that the vexing and endless work of democracy gets done.

Of course there’s another, even more important action, that’s neither daily nor restricted to elected official or jurors, vital as those individuals are. That action takes place every four years (or two, depending on the election). It’s the title of a Shepard Fairey poster in the show: “Vote!” Simple, direct, democratic. That title sure looks like another one of Fairey’s, his most famous, “Hope.”

POWER OF THE PEOPLE: Art and Democracy

At Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., through Feb. 16. 617-267-9300 www.mfa.org

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Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].