However, in the past, the simplified understanding of China's art and oriental thought in the United States and Europe dominated the whole art history, and the American and European art circles basically lacked interest and contact with the existing China culture. Western masters describe the history of modern art because they feel that they have nothing to learn from contemporary China art, although a few artists will continue to look for the intersection with pre-modern oriental art and ideas. Although today's world is in the era of globalization, cross-cultural travel and high-speed information circulation are very convenient, the cognitive asymmetry between the East and the West that existed in the 1920s and 1930s still exists today, that is, contemporary artists in China know what their American and European counterparts are doing, not the other way around.
Since the 2nd/kloc-0th century, Americans have become more and more interested in contemporary China art, but the motive force of this interest comes from the increasing integration of China economy and world economy, from curators, not from American artists, and this motive force is often felt from American commercial art exhibitions, not from American artists' creative centers and universities. Of course, some influential academic activities and exhibitions have begun in the United States. For example, "Art Exhibition on Capitol Hill" is co-sponsored by the American Institute of Asian Culture, the Library of Congress and the National Folklore Center. These exchange activities and exhibitions can be called progress. The original cultural forces of the East and the West have undergone subtle changes here, but Professor Zhao Xiaoming thinks this is far from enough. He agrees that contemporary China art can still shine in the American-centered western vision in the near future. Although at present, david clark's point of view still thinks that China's contemporary art is a temporary novelty to the west, or that the eastern world, which is more and more like the west, is learning the western "artistic" language as a relief. Wang Guangyi's works, for example, subverted the portrait painting method in the Cultural Revolution, ridiculed productism and made concessions to the capitalist world outlook, which, to some extent, is easy for people who support capitalist values to understand. This interpretation makes these works completely consistent with the ideology of socialist disintegration around the world, which guided American foreign policy in the post-cold war era. Other things in the work are only considered as regional colors. Even if there are some obvious political traces in the design, they are safe and controllable, and do not pose any challenge to American values or national systems, and have no impact on the current situation in the West. Before the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the works of some avant-garde artists in the former Soviet Union were highly sought after in the United States, and these works were regarded by American and European collectors as "the real voices of a few people under the pressure of totalitarianism". However, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they were surprised to find that these realistic works, which truly reflected people's lives, became a major landscape of the former Soviet Union, shattered the imagination of collectors in the United States and Europe on the socialist life form, and those paintings that were once sky-high also fell to the ground. It is worth noting that Wang, another contemporary painter in China, spread the oriental values of artistic freedom, which is not taken for granted in the free United States. In the past three months, during the American art exhibition held for him by the American Institute of Asian Culture, the American public and the American Art Museum discussed some of his works exhibited in the United States for his artistic freedom and political reasons, and two groups of sharp confrontational voices continued to be heard in universities, art galleries and the media. Is he anti-war or anti-American? However, it is this opposition that is king, and China's contemporary art has won valuable discourse power and remarkable historical traces.
Promoting communication plays a fundamental role in improving the status of China art in the West represented by the United States, because communication can highlight the social and cultural background of art. When China contemporary art appeared in the Library of Congress, the National Folklore Center and the Smithsonian National Art Museum, it accelerated the establishment of China's reputation in the western world. However, today, the shadow of money worship, which is seriously commercialized in China's art world, has threatened this academic effort. One of the reasons is that few commercial curators in China can fully understand the United States, so they have little ability to "discover" a relatively unknown art exchange platform. China's art is often isolated in international exhibitions. For the problems emphasized by China, the West has its own inherent understanding framework, but contemporary artists in China do not feel uncomfortable in this framework. This is a status quo that must be changed quickly. On the other hand, although China's curators brought China's contemporary art to the western audience, their images of China's contemporary art background to the world were very scattered, so it should be the responsibility of China art historians to provide such background reading. However, up to now, art history has proved that art history circle is far from being good at showing China's artistic achievements. China's art history circle needs a lot of changes if it wants to fully face the challenges of this era. However, Professor Zhao Xiaoming later introduced that he had begun to pay attention to the changes in this field, and as institutions, China Academy of Fine Arts and Central Academy of Fine Arts were the pioneers of this force.
Besides the study of China's art history, there is also a regrettable gap between art history and art criticism. Art critics, like curators, have played an active role in introducing contemporary China art to a wider audience, but they failed to provide the required rich background research. To a large extent, western audiences usually feel that China's contemporary art has developed in a historical vacuum. If we want to avoid framing contemporary China art in a superficial way accepted by the West, China art circles must comprehensively and accurately show powerful methods to the West. Completely abolish the western-centered thinking and elaboration of artistic modernity.
In this speech, Professor Zhao Xiaoming obviously doesn't want to simply and widely cover the modern and contemporary art in China that was marginalized in the previous world art history documents, but wants to open a new perspective in the whole art history to dispel the existing western hegemony. Only when these new and diverse perspectives emerge through dialogue, rather than appearing in advance, can the academic circles say that art history has become a global discipline. Globalization requires an insight into the nature of regional importance and the elimination of condescending unified views.
Nowadays, overseas members working in American universities and cultural institutions play an important role in drawing people's attention to the cultural contributions of ethnic minorities to the United States. Similarly, the number of Chinese Americans is increasing rapidly, and the political self-awareness of Chinese living in the United States is getting stronger and stronger, and the multicultural society in the United States has also responded to this, which is one of the reasons why major American museums are willing to hold exhibitions for China's contemporary art works.
What is important now is to show the world the regional background of China's artistic growth. In this context, contemporary art in China plays an active and unique cultural role. Of course, it does not mean that art can only be meaningful in its original place, nor does it mean that background is the only way to understand works. Emphasizing the region is not to demonstrate that the regional background is more real and concrete than other contents, nor to deny the existence of globalization forces in culture. The concept of region is not an imaginary residual cultural space. This concept regards the region as a relatively independent background in which the forces of globalization play a role. On this issue, the professor quoted Qiu, an art singer from China Shanghai Conservatory of Music, as a popular solo concert in the Asian Month celebration held in the United States in April 2007, which proved the regional strength in cross-cultural communication.
When talking about American contemporary art, Professor Zhao said that since the founding of the People's Republic of China, American art history has always been regarded as not leaving the shadow of European art. Since andy warhol's generation, American art has not only had its own artistic characteristics, but also formed a complete modern art system composed of art history criticism, art museum exhibitions, art undertakings and art funds, thus making the world art center move from Paris to new york after World War II. What's more, the pop art, concept art, earth art, minimalism and video art it created in the 1960s and 1970s actually influenced European art in turn in artistic thought and aesthetics.
On the one hand, the miracle created by American art and its position as the world art center are directly related to the comprehensive national strength of the empire established by the United States after the war. This is manifested in the economic strength of the United States, which makes a large number of American emerging bourgeoisie begin to collect a large number of contemporary art in less than ten years, and various national and private art galleries, foundations and galleries emerge in large numbers, objectively providing an economic foundation for the rise of American art; On the other hand, the formation of American post-war supranational imperial structure and mature commercial and urban cultural systems has made Americans' world outlook and self-emotional world have new characteristics that other countries and regions do not have, which has provided new emotional resources and ideological background for American new art to a great extent. In addition, the global media system and university elite cultural research system established after the war in the United States have objectively provided impetus for the theoretical summary and global dissemination of American art.
Of course, it would be simplistic to think that new york can replace Paris as the world art center only by its developed economic strength and the comprehensive advantages of the empire. In fact, when Japan's economy took off in the 1980s, it also spent a lot of money on western art, but it did not become an art center or even asia art center. The rise of American art is undoubtedly due to the emergence of great artists like andy warhol, Leuther, Smithsonian and Naumann. Their art has really changed or at least doubted the artistic essence constructed by European art for a long time, and made great breakthroughs in the concept of art itself, art and commerce, art and popular culture, art and art galleries, art and philosophy, art and electronic images, art and abstract vision. Conversely, we can look at modern European art after World War II.
Modern art originated in the modernism period in Paris and Europe. Before World War II, the United States basically only studied Italian futurism, Soviet Russian constructivism, surrealism and Paris Dadaism. But after World War II, it was Europe's turn to learn from America's younger brother.
In 1950s after World War II, American upper class like Rockefeller family and artists like critic Greenberg began to brew and popularize contemporary art with American artistic style. Due to the opportunity of the Cultural Cold War, the American right-wing bourgeoisie, represented by the new york Museum of Modern Art, and the Central Intelligence Agency jointly promoted the abstract expressionist art, represented by Pollock and Dekunin, as the pure art of the United States after the war to flaunt the non-ideological cultural image, in order to fight against the socialist ideological art. Although abstract art still comes from the modern tradition in Europe, Greenberg emphasized its "cowboy" characteristics in modern America. Abstract expressionism is actually the budding period of American art with self-consciousness expanding and actively emphasizing non-Europeanization, but it does not deviate from the basic nature of modern European painting in essence.
Professor Zhao Xiaoming immediately pointed out that in art textbooks, it is often conclusively believed that abstract painting is the original creation of western artists; From mondriaan (1872 ~ 1944, Dutch painter), to Kandinsky (1866- 1944, Russian painter), to American expressionism, the history of abstract art has been fixed at the contemporary age of 100 years. However, in Professor Zhao's understanding, the inner spirit and expressive elements of abstract painting are rooted in China's artistic tradition, and its historical origin can be traced back to the painting in the Jin Dynasty in 400 AD, and even back to the origin of China's hieroglyphics and calligraphy artistic traditions. It is believed that the source of abstract painting art lies in the East, not in the West. Oriental painting art, poetry art and philosophical tradition have one thing in common, that is, they pursue "artistic conception" and emphasize the ethereal realm of "meaning can only be expressed but not expressed". The contribution of contemporary western artists to abstract art mainly lies in the integration of oil painting expression techniques in western painting art, especially the application of "color" and "light sense" to the expression elements of "freehand brushwork" abstract painting, thus forming a school of modern western painting art, which is an excellent example of a new artistic life after the integration of eastern and western cultures. However, if abstract painting is understood as the originality of western artists, it is putting the cart before the horse. Professor Zhao also believes that due to the influence of rationalism philosophy, modern western abstract painting shows a form that is divorced from the image world, so it is a kind of "formal expressionism" or "formal abstraction". This "formalism" lacks the strength and depth of life and the organic combination with the image world. Finally, as an artistic language, it rose for a while, but it was difficult to succeed. This can explain why the western abstract painting art, "from form to form", has only gone 100 years and has become a passive water. Only by returning to the oriental aesthetic tradition and taking the emotional experience of life as the artistic object, can abstract painting keep the youth of artistic life forever. In this regard, Professor Zhao Xiaoming specifically mentioned Shaoqing Peter Wu, a contemporary abstract painter in China. The true non-Europeanization of American art began in the 1960s and 1970s. Andy warhol first began to identify with American business culture and popular vision. There is nothing wrong with his massive speeches, works of art, lifestyle, emphasis on the commercialization of art, popular cool culture, artists' stars and recognition of materialism. This self-attitude towards business "I like it, so I am here" is unimaginable in European society at the same time.
But in fact, other American artists did not fully emphasize the erosion and capitalization of art by business as andy warhol did. The more outstanding artistic trend of thought in the 1970s was actually anti-business and anti-system, such as the 65,438+0,500-foot spiral dike of Smithsonian, an earth artist on Utah Salt Lake. Hindes made a huge crack 1500 feet long, 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide in Nevada, and * * * blasted 240,000 tons of rock; De Maria used natural lightning to build thousands of "lightning field" works of metal poles in the wild. For a long time, these artists have been engaged in artistic creation that cannot be collected in uninhabited wilderness, and earth art has also broken through the artistic concept of art museum walls.
Leuther's conceptual art also broke the prejudice that American art has no philosophical thoughts, almost reaching an extreme of self-subversion since modern European art, and laid the ideological foundation for the ideological trend of conceptual art that swept the world later. Leuther's own thought is rigorous. He thinks that art is first and foremost an idea, which is the most rigorous theoretical exposition of conceptual art since Duchamp.
It is worth noting that although the comprehensive national strength and economic foundation of the United States were in full swing after the war, in fact, artists who made pioneering explorations were in a period of extreme economic difficulties during the 30 years from the 1950s to the 1970s. Most Americans, the middle class and the upper class, actually do not agree with and understand these avant-garde arts that later won the world influence and imperial image for the United States. Pollock was almost down and out in the 1950s; Andy warhol's works were first ignored in 1960s, and sold in large quantities ten years later. Although people like Hindes almost live the life of wandering artists in the wilderness, they never give up their infinite pursuit of art.
Professor Zhao said in his speech that he recently read an article entitled "Art and Money: The Brilliant Course of Contemporary Art in China". The article begins like this: "In a VIP room of Shanghai New Vision Restaurant Lounge overlooking the Bund, sliced beef with pepper and fried sea bass are accompanied by a series of western-style dishes, as well as loud toasts and crisp cheers. Sitting here are not wealthy businessmen or bureaucrats, but more than 20 China contemporary avant-garde artists and their guests, including Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Ceng Fanzhi.
Of course, they didn't just come here to eat large pieces of meat and drink in big bowls. They made a special trip from Beijing and other places to attend the new solo exhibition of Ceng Hao, another rising star in China's contemporary art world. Zhou Tiehai, an artist from Shanghai, took a sip of Chilean red wine and pouted, saying: There have been such banquets before, but recently there have been many. The banquet was held on a Saturday night at No.3 Bund, a historic building built in 19 16. Under the eaves of No.3 Bund, Armani flagship store and Shenhu Gallery are accommodated at the same time, which seems to reflect the glorious "money" course of contemporary art in China. As for the realistic pride of contemporary artists in China described in this reportage, Professor Zhao did not make any comments and analysis on the artists' general sense of social responsibility, mission, values and moral power of pursuing truth as usual.
At the end of the speech, Professor Zhao Xiaoming introduced the system and methods of sponsoring culture and art in the United States. He said: According to the budget of the National Art Foundation of the United States in 2003, the American government provided $654.38+0.5 billion for cultural and artistic undertakings. The National Arts Foundation is the largest source of funds for artists and scholars sponsored by the US government. It is estimated that the total annual sponsorship of American public and private funds for culture and art is $654.38+0.2 billion. The gap between these two figures shows that the United States has adopted a decentralized, basically voluntary and highly dynamic mechanism to support cultural undertakings. Although the mechanism of the United States is different from the centralized management in some countries, it is deeply rooted in American history and widely supported by the American people.
Relatively speaking, the United States is still a decentralized country. In the United States, many services provided by states in other regions are provided by states and localities or through support organizations. Most Americans like to call this country the federal government, not the central government. The federal government plays an important role in maintaining a vibrant cultural environment, while individuals, companies and other non-governmental organizations in the United States provide most of the funds. The advantage of this system lies in its vitality: various and ever-changing cultures and arts are backed by thousands of sources of funds, and almost every state has some channels to provide sponsorship.
Europe's model of centralized sponsorship of culture and art originated from the tradition of royal nobles supporting culture and art, and was later inherited by modern countries. In contrast, the United States has never had a royal family or hereditary nobility. The United States holds high the banner of individual freedom to provide sponsorship for culture and art, and has established a system that relies entirely on private charities, supplemented by government sponsorship, and encourages private donations.
The federal government provides about 2% of the funds needed for culture and art, and state and local institutions provide about 8%. However, government sponsorship can often produce seed effect and multiplier effect. The new organization is of great significance even if it receives less federal funding. Once an artist or art institution is recognized by the federal government, it will often gain a certain status in the eyes of private sponsors. The National Arts Foundation, the largest source of federal sponsorship, estimates that every dollar of government sponsorship can help beneficiary institutions attract 7 to 8 dollars of private sponsorship and income.
Since many sponsorship decisions are not made by Washington, American artists don't have to be so active in proving the value of their work to government officials. No government agency can have a great influence on American cultural life.
The National Foundation for the Arts never uses its own resources to impose its will on the American art world. At the same time, American philanthropy is huge and can reliably sponsor a large number of cultural and artistic activities. There are 1 0,500 professional theaters, 1 0,200 symphony orchestras and about 120 opera troupes in the United States. In such a country across the American continent, many people live far away from the cultural centers of big cities, so the decentralization policy will help culture and art get closer to the people.
The greatest contribution of the American federal government to culture and art can be said to be the tax relief for charitable donations. Most Americans can deduct donations to qualified non-profit organizations from the income tax payable. Even without this kind of tax preference, Americans are still willing to sponsor culture and art, and the atmosphere of American folk charitable donation is much earlier than the birth of income tax. However, due to tax relief, the amount of private donations greatly exceeds the direct sponsorship of the federal government. It is estimated that in 2003, the total sponsorship provided by private funds for artists and art groups was $654.38+0.2 billion, and the per capita donation in the United States was $42, of which about half came from individual donations, one third from foundations and the rest from companies and enterprises.
American sponsorship of culture and art is not limited to donations. Compared with European countries, American cultural groups rely more on ticket revenue. For example, American orchestras earn 40% of concert tickets, while German orchestras may receive 80% of the sponsorship directly from the government. The American system helps everyone to sponsor their favorite music, drama and literature with their own entertainment expenses.
American steel giant andrew carnegie donated 350 million US dollars, part of which was used to build 3,000 public libraries and a university. Carnegie once said, "I decided to stop accumulating and start a more serious and difficult task of distributing property wisely." Other tycoons who set up foundations include Henry Ford and john rockefeller. Today, many people continue to provide sponsorship for culture and art. If we don't understand the key role of the interaction between the public sector and the private sector in the United States, we can't conduct a complete investigation of American culture and art.
All countries in the world hope to sponsor culture and art in a way that conforms to their specific values and historical accumulation, and create a rich artistic and cultural life. The United States supports culture and art through flexible mechanisms, encourages private donations and promotes individual autonomy with public funds as leverage.
At the end of the wonderful speech for one and a half hours, Professor Zhao Xiaoming said: "The power of art can touch the heart and broaden the mind." End the speech.