[pooh的百宝箱] [color=#1200ff] POOH百宝箱之艺术篇 [复制链接]

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发表于 2004-6-23 17:15:47 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

这是我很宝贝的一篇资料，里面不仅有对艺术历史和功能的概括，还有大量的例子，可以利用的地方我都标了出来。仅这一篇文章就几乎可以应付所有的AW里面的艺术类了！！！

[B]NOTE:这篇文章里面提到了艺术upset的功能和科学reassure，我用粗体表出来了，相信看过之后大家对那个issue题目的理解应该不成问题了。还有文章里面的例子，好好利用啊！

[/B]

We may generally agree that art has many incarnations: drama, music, painting and sculpture, film, such literary expressions as poetry and the novel, the dance, and, in some ways, architecture. Today we see art forms entering fields that were undreamed of only a half-century ago -- video art, for example; music in which the performers rather than the composer decide what to play and when; dance in which dancers deliberately fall down; and plays without words. The primary question, "what are the arts" is best addressed if we ask about the function of art. Just what do the arts do? For whom?

Across the history of Western civilization there have been more than a few formulations of what the arts do, but I will focus on five. These are functions that have been important, both in the longer Western tradition, and in the relatively short three centuries in which our country has participated in art. Perhaps the oldest definition of the function of the arts is that they provide pleasure. They offer sheer entertainment. We like stories, as in short fiction and TV specials and popular movies. We enjoy being reminded of the familiar, as in musical patterns we have heard since childhood, and we are pleased by arrangements of color, form, sound, and process that remove us from our everyday cares.

That the arts provide pleasure and escape is one formulation. Another is that they present us with insight into what is eternal and universal. Traditionally, this has been called the theory of imitation. Behind every profound work of art, this point of view proposes, is a set of principles about humanity that always prevails. A Renaissance painting of a Madonna and child, for many viewers, is somehow a revelation of transcendent spirituality; a Beethoven symphony is the last word on human endurance. Certain arrangements of color and movement satisfy us over a long period of time, like the ballet Swan Lake, for instance, or Impressionist paintings. We judge them as beautiful. Beauty, many would insist, is the very hallmark of what is truly "art."

To these may be added a third function. The arts are didactic -- they teach us. Shakespeare's Macbeth, for instance, teaches us that inordinate ambition is pernicious. Ingemar Bergman's films urge us not to miss the unspoken and the delicately nuanced. All the narrative arts, in fact, instruct us to some extent. When we watch a play that is deeply moral, we see ourselves in the characters, we recognize our own destinies in the plot, and we find the moral dilemma of the action to be representative of problems in all human relationships.

So far we have defined the arts as providing pleasure, beauty, and instruction. At the beginning of the 19th century, these functions were considered to be the primary responsibilities of art. During most of Western history before this point, the nature of art had been determined primarily by leaders of society's most powerful institutions -- the church, the government, and the aristocracy. Artists were craftsmen at the service of leaders, and much of the work that they were commissioned to create interpreted and upheld their social vision.

Beginning about 1800, these principles were radically called into question, and we continue to live in an era of challenge. As the church and government, first in one European country and then another, pulled away from commissioning art, artists became competing members of entrepreneurial societies. Artists clamored to attract the notice of potential patrons, setting themselves apart as distinctive individual creators. The pianist Franz Liszt, for instance, in the 1830s and 40s created a public personality as the great piano virtuoso of the era. Socialites who hired him to play at their salons were proud to tell friends that he played the piano with such intensity that repairmen had to be called in afterwards. This function of the arts can be denoted as "expressionism" -- the artist's use of a medium to express unique passion and insight. Poets such as Emily Dickinson and Theodore Roethke, painters such as the American sea painter Winslow Homer, the black folk artist Horace Pipkin, and musicians like blues artist Clarence Leadbelly used the arts to express their deepest private feelings and their vision of the universe. What they created were not works that expressed an official or institutional point of view. They elevated the personal to a level of all-consuming importance.

A second kind of expressionism also developed in the 19th century. This one was much more offensive. In societies undergoing tremendous change, artists began to use art to agitate for social change. The French painter Honore Daumier, for instance, in the 1830s used his brush and pencil to protest political oppression. In early 20th-century America, Theodore Dreiser used the novel to point out the devastating loss of place experienced by workers who fled the rural for the opportunities of the city. Photographer Sherry Levine has used grotesque images of women to protest the oppression of the female gender by American advertising, law, and social custom. This form of expressionism we can call cultural criticism. That is, artists take a stand against certain practices in the society that they consider to be unjust. They become a social conscience. Their viewers and readers are typically angered, and in response, artists often consider the intensity of their offensiveness a badge of honor. Their responsibility, in this view, is to shock. "The artist sees what his fellow citizens can't," the French critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 1840s. Some artists pay dearly for it. Henrik Ibsen was almost run out of town for a play that showed the willingness of a resort community to poison its visitors with contaminated water so long as the tourist dollars kept pouring in. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of the King. In the early 20th century, Georges Braque, the French cubist painter, expressed his conviction that the most valuable art is deeply provocative. [B]"Science reassures us," Braque wrote. "The arts disturb us."[/B]

One can well understand that these most recent functions of art -- the expression of private feelings and the criticism of society -- are seen as grave threats by citizens who want entertainment, or beauty, or peace. Yet, an ever-lengthening honor roll distinguishes works first received as unacceptable by resistant audiences. Beethoven's early listeners, accustomed to the predictable harmonies and melodic lengths of Haydn, dismissed his symphonies as literally causing their ears to hurt. The Parisian audience for Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" in 1913 rioted when the orchestra first performed it. The paintings of Thomas Eakins, now recognized as among the greatest in the American tradition, were rejected as intolerable by his sitters. Van Gogh, two of whose still life paintings have recently broken all records in selling for $50 million, sold only one of his paintings in his entire career. Thoreau's Walden was an economic failure, and Melville's Moby Dick was so poorly received that he went into seclusion for years. When the French gave the Statue of Liberty to our nation in 1886, the Augusta Chronicle -- in Georgia -- condemned it as a pagan image unsuitable to our country.

The corollary to the function of the arts is the inquiry, who consumes the arts? In the earliest years of the American Colonies, most artistic practice was applied to the making of architectural ornament, of pewter and silver vessels for home use -- elements we would consider "craft" that were part of the everyday lives of many of the colonists. Paintings, drama, and imaginative literature were rarely part of everyday life, even of occasional life -- even for the educated and well-to-do. This was because the vast systems of assistance -- of what Howard Becker calls "art worlds" -- were not yet in place. To produce plays, a director needs actors, costumes, a place to produce them, and an audience -- all of which come into being through the slow building up of expectations that plays are important enough to support with money and time. No less is this true of the creation of large paintings, or publishing novels. These are very practical reasons, and in early New England at least, there were factors of ideology as well. The Puritans, and those they influenced, were suspicious of complex artistic productions. They were persuaded that such art distracted attention from religious contemplation and work.

However small the early audience for art was in the Colonies, it was to expand by leaps and bounds in the 19th century United States. By the time of the Revolution, American political leaders and thinkers had been acutely aware of the ambitiousness of our government ideals and insisted that we must distinguish ourselves from European nations. As they observed the role of the most complex of the arts in European societies -- none of which were democracies -- they saw that arts were enjoyed only by the privileged. They had in mind lavish gardens of sculptured mythological figures, rooms of huge paintings depicting mythological fantasies, and expensive stage productions in which the aristocracy actually took part. In those contexts, the arts were expensive, and what was even more worrisome, they were patently not devoted to instruction or spiritual uplift.

Some Americans argued that complex forms of art did not have to assume the forms they had taken in Europe. They felt that after Americans had developed their economy, their intellectual life, and the social glue of their communities, the arts would find a natural place in national life. John Adams, for instance, wrote his wife Abigail at the time of the Revolution:

"I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

By the 1830s, this vision began to come true in the United States. It took place first in the realm of print, with the importation of journals, novels, poetry, and philosophy. European musicians came to this country to teach and tour. People in urban centers, like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Charleston, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, began to take national pride in works that were about American places and experiences. Washington Irving wrote light satirical sketches about old Dutch characters and timorous New Englanders, delighting his New York readers. Dramatists and actors began to develop plays and character sketches about such original American characters as the Yankee and the frontiersman. Landscape painters began to interest buyers in pictures of American scenery. By about 1840, it was not unusual to argue that all of this activity meant that the nation was intellectually and morally healthy. In addition, many argued that this activity was necessary in order for the community of citizens to live the fullest possible lives. Amidst the great concern that Americans were entirely too concerned with making money, many expressed the conviction that pictures would turn their thoughts to beauty, music would calm their ambition, and the best literature would send them into the contemplation of matters other than dollars. Through the expansion of networks of publishing, of art academies, traveling dramatic troupe, and small orchestras, towns and cities across the growing nation became part of the democratization of the arts. After the Civil War, many citizens amassed gigantic fortunes and became major collectors, and in the 1870s some of these very citizens began to establish public museums so that their less affluent fellow citizens could enjoy paintings and other beautiful objects as part of their everyday lives.

If we look briefly at recent times, we find an even greater enlargement of audiences for the arts throughout the nation. The mass media have become part of that spread. Television has made it possible to explore the work of artists with a close-up focus that is impossible in museum visits. Television has made it possible to see in the performance of music -- the very bowing technique of violinists and the embouchere of flutists -- and to sit with Bill Moyers in the study of noted philosophers and sociologists of our time to hear them discuss their ideas. In communities large and small, in chain bookstores, as well as in the few specialty stores left, and on television, plays, ballet, paintings, sculptures, novels, and films in a wide range of intensity have been presented to mass -- as well as select -- audiences. Yet even as the employment of television in artistic production spread, many onlookers were persuaded that all was not well. Much of the mass audience seemed to wish merely to be pleased. What was being produced for the audiences who wished to be instructed, or to come face to face with the personal expression, or to be challenged, provoked, and even angered?

The National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities were chartered to meet some of these concerns. As the result of a substantial groundswell, in the early 1960s, of the conviction that the arts were crucial to the preservation of a lively, thoughtful society, Congress chartered the National Endowments in 1965. The NEA was given the responsibility to make possible individual artist's creativity as well as exhibitions that would bring art to large numbers of viewers across the country. The NEH was given the responsibility to encourage the interpretation of the arts, and more broadly, of the humanities. Scholars were to carry out this interpretation in formats accessible to large numbers of American readers, viewers, and museum-goers.

At the heart of the work of the Endowments was the conviction that the market forces in our society would not by themselves sustain a challenging artistic culture. In the 15-year period previous to the foundation of the Endowments, for instance, the art market had begun the climb to the precipitous heights at which it prevails today. Prices for old master and 19th-century paintings tripled, while artists still alive were struggling to make a living. The establishment of the Endowments attempted to guarantee American audiences that viewing or consuming would not be controlled by the marketplace. The Endowments were created to offer the creators, exhibitors, and viewers of art the same kind of encouragement and sanctuary that our constitution offers the pursuit of ideas in language.

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[pooh的百宝箱] [color=#1200ff] POOH百宝箱之艺术篇 [复制链接]

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