However, the fate of these critics and their theories in China is quite different. When the domestic literary criticism circles are full of various literary criticism theories of the last century, many of the above-mentioned art critics are even unheard of in the domestic art criticism circles. Art history has always been regarded as one of the weakest disciplines in China's historiography, and the lack of art criticism theory undoubtedly aggravates its backwardness. Venturi, the most famous historian of art criticism in the last century, once asserted that all art history is a history of criticism, because the description, interpretation and evaluation of works in art history involve art criticism, or it can be said that it is a task of criticism. The degree of dissatisfaction with western art history in the second half of the 20th century can be seen from the increasing number of publications questioning the methodological basis of art history in Europe and America. It can be said that the rapid development of critical theory has changed the direction of art history. Accordingly, its absence has also become the hardest hit area of the domestic art history discipline.
As an incubator, reporter, arbiter and even maker of modern art trends, critics have long been regarded as the key to the dynamic mechanism of contemporary art. Imagine the role of these critics in catalyzing and helping people understand those artistic movements: Frye to post-impressionism, Apollinaire to cubism, Greenberg to abstract expressionism. Perhaps, we can quote the viewpoint of American art critic Cusbitt as our initial understanding of the general nature of art criticism. He thinks that the role of art critics is often absurd. Because when art was still fresh and weird, he took the lead, often the most vivid response, and initially explained its meaning to us. However, his response is often not comprehensive, because such works of art have not been widely experienced: the works have not yet had a history, and a context that can explain the "text" accordingly. When critics regard art as a product of the present, it still lacks the "load" of history. In fact, part of a critic's job is to win a lawsuit in the court of history. This is why, as Baudelaire said, critics are often "enthusiastic and partisan observers" of works of art, rather than impartial judges of their value. Because of its modernity, he played the role of an agitator and could only handle the whole case from the perspective of the work itself. For a sensitive critic, the work always surprises him, and he always remains enthusiastic about it. He will let future historians deal with such things as dissecting works of art-at that time, it is usually considered to be of recognized significance.
However, the current views of critics often become the basic evaluation of the essential characteristics of works. The reaction of critics, if not the paradigm of all future explanations, is at least the condition of all future explanations. His concern is the ticket for his works to enter history. The symbol of modern critic's power is his naming of new art. For example, Louis. Vaksel's labels "Fauvism" and "Cubism" have greatly influenced people's understanding of these styles. Through naming, these works of art are endowed with some essential characteristics of future people. Moreover, this is just a "symbolic enclave"-borrowing Uberto. The word "trust-free ecology", which begins with understanding, has become a whole set of language of discourse configuration and created an overall atmosphere of various viewpoints. To put it bluntly, its responsibility is great. Greenberg once wrote that the best time to treat a work of art critically is when its novelty has passed away and has not yet become history. However, it is at this moment that the interpretation of works of art is the most unsolvable and fragile time; It is also at this moment that the decisive decision made by critics in the form of impromptu naming can seal its fate once and for all. Just like the Oscars. As Oscar Wilde said in The Critics as Artists, criticism is very important to art; Critically grasp, preserve, cultivate and promote art.
Due to the lack of effective evaluation of criticism and basic reference to modern art criticism in Europe and America for hundreds of years, domestic art criticism is still in the dark stage. In recent 10 years, although a lot of western contemporary art materials have been imported, it is a pity that even the importers themselves are not very familiar with these materials (the chaotic post-modernism theoretical research in China is obvious proof), or they use tongue twisters to mash up in the art world, which often makes the original serious academic works varied. As a result, there even appeared-it is said that it is very popular in the Academy of Fine Arts-the absurd view that "Western art has nothing, and they have to wait until Cezanne to have literati paintings". If there is any theme in this book, one of them is definitely a criticism of this view. Just as we struggled to resist the so-called "western centralism", once upon a time, Chinese centralism had already sneaked back from the back door. In fact, has it left the "China" blood of our 5,000-year-old civilization? It may be too simple to simply attribute the confusion of ideas in the art world (including art education) to the lack of real art criticism (because one of the original intentions of criticism is "discrimination", even if the ideas are expressed as clearly as possible). But the indifference and ignorance of western art criticism have made our students suffer enough.
One of the consequences is that today's China art has gone to two-at least in my opinion-hopeless extremes. At the first pole, art has become a simple pen-and-ink game and self-entertainment, an elegant gameplay or craftsman's stuff that has nothing to do with the current sensibility. Such so-called painters are like reptiles curled up in caves, stubbornly and patiently curled up in their eggs and pills. Their hard shells are enough to resist any external harassment. In their view, social transformation, life evolution, sensitive changes and changes in aesthetic concepts are meaningless or non-existent. Its theoretical basis is said to come from Daniel. Daniel bell's theory of cultural contradiction holds that there are unsynchronized structures among economy-technology, politics-society and aesthetics-culture. The problem is that in Bell's view, it is only a description of "facts" (or "contradictory facts"), but in China's cultural conservatives, it has become an infallible "norm". Another theory is said to be karl popper's "problem situation" theory and E. Kang Brich's "schema theory", that is, the style of art history is the result of artists solving artistic problems in specific situations. Here, Popper's diverse "problem situation" is simplified to a simple "formal problem", while Gombrich's rich and multi-layered "interesting logic" is simplified to a pure "formal topic" of "procedure and matching".
Another reason for cultural conservatism is thought to come from "reflection on the logic of China's art history in the 20th century". In their observation, the so-called "three major artistic trends of thought" in the 20th century, namely Xu Beihong who advocated the westernization of ink painting and Lin Fengmian who advocated the integration of Chinese and Western painting, failed to some extent. Only Pan Tianshou, who advocated "opening the distance between Chinese and Western painting and reaching their respective peaks", achieved great success and became the most awesome master in the history of China fine arts in the 20th century, together with Wu Changshuo, Huang and Qi Baishi. The author of this book has no intention of denying the achievements of the above-mentioned people, and is not interested in the queuing problem between masters (including Xu and Lin). What I want to point out is a fact that has never been or rarely reflected upon by people: that is, how modern art in China (especially in Shanghai) died out in the 1930s and 40s under the attack of political murder and conservatives in the middle of last century. In my opinion, the so-called "three ideological trends", whether westernization, integration or distance, are just quarrels within the cultural conservative camp. Of the three real trends of thought in China's art history in the 20th century, only cultural conservatism has achieved unprecedented success. The "socialist realism" from the Soviet Union has never been persuaded in China in the past, but now it has become the ruminant feed for the critics of the new left, and the modernist baby millet has disappeared like a epiphyllum. However, after being suppressed for 30 years, its stubborn toxin finally bloomed quietly in the mid-1980s.
The second extreme-in my opinion, it is more sinister and vicious-is the epidemic virus that spread rapidly with fanaticism after the 1990 s: postmodernism. Just as in Europe and America, postmodernism is an alternative choice for leftist radical impulse when it can't challenge the existing capitalism (see French Philosophy in the 1960s, young French theorists Ferry and Alan Reynolds' counterattack against postmodern masters, and Eagleton's Illusion of Postmodernism), the prevalence of postmodernism in China is also the result of the frustration of the new enlightenment movement of radical intellectuals in China in the late 1980s. Since then, postmodernism has immediately become the best lifeline for cultural conservatism and the new left, accelerated the alliance between cultural conservatism and the new left in opposing modernism, and once again completed the murder of China modernism in the 1980s (situation and 44.
Postmodernism is a philosophical, social, cultural and artistic trend of thought that rose in the 1960s and flooded in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, mainly due to reading Habermas' watershed book Modernity: An Unfinished Project, western ideological circles began a powerful critical movement against postmodernism. A theme of western humanities and social sciences in 1980s and 1990s can be attributed to the debate between modernism and postmodernism. This is manifested in the master theory confrontation between Gadamer/Derrida and Habermas/Foucault in the ideological circle. It is manifested in the direct confrontation between the new generation of French thinkers Ferry and Renault and the post-modern thoughts such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Drex and Lyotard, which were overwhelming in the previous 20 years. In the critical circle of German Mesozoic ideological circle ([A. Valme], it is embodied in Hilton. Kramer's counter-attack to the "mediocre revenge" of postmodernism (referring to the revenge of Philistines) is reflected in Habermas' and wilmer's refutation of Jencks's "postmodern architectural theory and criticism", and also in the long-standing argument of "Warhol or Boyce" in art criticism. In the art movement, it is not only reflected in Germany's "neo-expressionism" declaring war on American pop art, but also in the large-scale retrospective exhibition of Pollock held by the American Museum of Modern Art in 1998-99 (a comparison between Pollock and Later), which is a famous collection of essays criticizing Pollock and his high modernism in 1980). Pollock: A New Method, published in 1999, also reflects people's persistent enthusiasm for the late figurative painting in Deland, Balthus and Mo Landi.
Since the 1990s, some special circumstances have actually declared the death of postmodernism as a persistent ideological trend in philosophy, ideology, culture and art, although some of its assumptions will have a lasting impact. This is also one of the conclusions of my book Overdraft Imagination: An Introduction to Modern Philosophy (Lin Xue Press, 2022). Under these circumstances, "Heidegger Incident", "Paul. De. "Paul de Man Incident" and "Sokal Incident" are typical enough. It is said that Heidegger is the most original thinker in the 20th century, and only Wittgenstein can match him. However, Heidegger leveled Greek ontology, medieval theological ontology and modern logical ontology, and conceptualized them as "ontology-theory-logic" equally, which is a typical reductionism. On this basis, he regarded the whole western history after Socrates as "the darkness away from God" and came to the darkest period of "the night will reach midnight" in the 20th century, which is also an oversimplified interpretation of western history (obviously Nietzsche's anti-enlightenment postmodern thought "human history is not a history of progress, but a history of degradation"). Because Heidegger wears such philosophical sunglasses, it is impossible for him to distinguish between colors and levels in the reality of the 20th century, and thus regard national socialism, totalitarianism and liberal democracy as "products of modernity". In his view, German Nazism, Soviet imperialism and American liberalism are all "one thing". This explains to some extent what he did in the Nazi movement in Germany and the subsequent "non-Nazi" movement. The complexity of the "Heidegger Incident" certainly does not allow people to make a simple analogy between a thinker's thoughts and his actions in the world, that is, it is unwise to say that Heidegger's thoughts directly led to his Nazi behavior, or that Heidegger's actions once proved that his thoughts were Nazi. However, if we say that Heidegger's thoughts, more broadly speaking, are German right-wing intellectuals (Heidegger, Jung, Scheler, [max scheler], Karl) in the 1920s and 1930s. [carl schmitt] The favorite "April 2" of the right-wing intellectuals in China's research circles clamors for irrational thoughts that have nothing to do with Nazi ideology, such as the earth, blood, war and race. That's so naive!
In the 1960s, the post-structuralist trend of thought in France was basically cultivated by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and came to the United States across the ocean, where it gained more exposed postmodern motives: just as the United States was caught in the quagmire of the Vietnam War, it encountered the greatest legitimacy crisis of the values of freedom and democracy. American postmodernism headed by Derrida and backed by the so-called "Yale Gang of Four" has spread rapidly around the world. The most famous is Paul. De. Dude. This man is extremely clever, fluent in writing and clear in thinking. Its basic point of view is that all texts are exposed and hidden by the author, and they are strategies for memory and forgetting. All reading is misreading. Writing and reading constitute a game of exposure and cover-up, interview and projection between the author and the reader. In the late 1980s, from some files of his youth, he was found to be an active anti-Semitic in Nazi period. Therefore, naive deconstructionists in American universities, especially in English departments, suddenly realized a fact: the causal relationship between deconstruction and the suppression (forgetting) of evil consciousness.
In the early 1990s, the "Sokal Incident" in America shattered the last beautiful fantasy of postmodernism. Socard, an American physicist, spent nearly two years deliberately concocting a scam called Beyond Boundaries: Towards the Transformation Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. It is full of common-sense scientific mistakes, but at the same time it is full of post-modernist favorite whimsy and fashionable terms, and it was submitted to Social Context (F. fredric jameson, visiting professor and one of the editors of China Academy of Social Sciences), one of the most famous post-modernist publications in the United States. As a result, this article was published. Although the far-reaching significance of this incident is far from being fully realized, it is generally believed that this move shows how absurd the academic level of postmodernists has fallen.
It is no exaggeration to say that the above three events have actually declared the bankruptcy of postmodernism at three levels: philosophy, literature, art and social culture. An "event" is an "event" because people pour a lot of enthusiasm and are involved in countless documents. Around these events, people can organize different ideas, thus endowing the mental state of an era with material form. The mental state of this era is that people have gained a clear sense of self, that is, postmodernism should be understood as a pathological symptom of western society in the second half of the 20th century. Postmodernism, with its intellectual anti-rationalism, moral cynicism and emotional hedonism, has not escaped the sharp criticism of people of insight in the West even at its most popular time. Habermas mentioned many times in this book is such a thinker. Others believe that postmodernism is the antithesis of western modernism. Now, the opposite near the end has lost its previous advantages, and a new synthesis has begun to appear. That is "post-modernism": wilmer and Hotnett adhere to the dialectical view of modernism and post-modernism, which is considered as such a solution. However, the author of this book is more inclined to stick to a modernist position of expanding connotation, and thinks that Habermas's "unfinished modernity" or Berger's "post-avant-garde art" is more desirable. Because, if modernism is the theme of western modern art, then Berger's "historical avant-garde" (meaning Dadaism, early surrealism and Soviet avant-garde art) aimed at undermining the principle of modernism autonomy is the opposite of modernism. Postmodernism, in a sense, is only a continuation of European avant-garde art (represented by Toussaint), and in a sense, it is a funny American version of European avant-garde art (represented by Warhol, refer to the wonderful analysis of Huisen described in this book). Therefore, modernism, which originated from the sensitive consciousness of modernity, is far from exhausted. On the contrary, it has shown more tenacious vitality after encountering historical avant-garde art and post-modernism. This is what this book calls "boundless modernism".
However, just when postmodernism came to an end in its original place, it got an unexpected opportunity to multiply in China. Different from some critics, the author of this book does not simply attribute China's postmodernism to the results of academic and artistic circles (so-called "discourse translation"). The spread of postmodernism in China has deep-seated historical reasons, as well as more concrete and rational realistic motives. Post-modernism's anti-foundationalism, anti-totality, anti-subjectivity, emphasizing dynamic process and neglecting static structure are so in tune with China's pre-modernity thinking that it is not difficult for people to distinguish the meaning of China's conservatism from post-modernism after a little thinking. The postmodern visual aesthetics such as nonlinear geometry, asymmetry, anti-sublimity, scattered perspective and even China's garden-like "postmodern space" are exactly the same as China's pre-modernity aesthetics. Charles, the most powerful advocate of western postmodern architecture. Mr Jencks's wife is a landscape expert in China. It is not difficult to understand that some European and American post-modernist "architects" shouted "Post-modernist architecture in China" after visiting China. As a result, the disastrous chaos, rude local worship and unrestrained retro-ism in the poor era were immediately declared as the avant-garde of post-modernity. In recent years, those clumsy pseudo-modern buildings, cliched modernism and the so-called "economic take-off era" are of course indiscriminately declared as "modernist garbage".
When postmodernism settled in China, it was the time when the "new enlightenment" of undifferentiated China intellectuals in the 1980s was hit hard. This gives postmodernism a golden opportunity to spread in China. From the publication of "Towards Postmodernism" by Peking University in the early 1990s, Peking University and China Academy of Social Sciences marched into the publication of "Postmodernism" culture: postmodern cultural research, postmodern culture and aesthetics, postcolonial cultural criticism, and the spectacular "intellectual library" (it seems that only postmodernists can be called "intellectuals"). Obviously, in addition to catering to cultural conservatism, postmodernism is too much to the appetite of the new left. In the eyes of China's cultural conservatives and new leftists, is there anything better than post-modernism that preaches metaphysical terrorism, the prison of rational society, the sinister intention of western centralism, the utopia of freedom and democracy, the lies of globalization, identity and difference, and the relativism of culture and value?
Just as conservatives suddenly found the new legitimacy of China's pre-modernity from post-modernism, China's post-modernism learned "the game without chassis" (Derrida), "everything can be done" (Dento), "happy nihilism" (Oliwa) and "not serious" (Susan. Sontag ([susan sontag]12300]) invented political pop, rascal realism, New literati paintings, playing with the heartbeat, being not serious at all, and all kinds of fake conceptual arts. However, unlike the danger of conservatism, the danger of China's postmodernism lies not in its formal playthings and decorations that have nothing to do with the current sensibility, but in the other extreme: ignoring all formal laws and the pure concept of visual quality. The reasonable factor of western "historical avant-garde art" is that their anti-form and anti-art are based on the high formalism of western modern art history, especially classical modernism. In this way, the opposite of avant-garde art has a certain legitimacy. Without any context, China's postmodernism has suddenly reached the avant-garde art of anti-form, so it can't produce real cultural and political effects except isolated individual events. Moreover, its real danger lies in that it covers up such a basic fact with a seemingly radical concept: that is, China's modernity is inherently imperfect; The short-circuit form of this thought stifles the modernity appeal of China's contemporary art.
When this book was about to be completed, I read the following passage by Eagleton, a famous British critical theorist. While applauding, I couldn't help secretly complaining: Such knowledge needs an outsider thousands of miles away from us. Isn't that enough to make China people (including myself) feel ashamed? He said: "Today, there is a post-modern research institution in Peking University. China imports Derrida as well as food music (Peking University also wants to hire Derrida as an honorary professor-author publishing house). A time warp that needs to be further explored. The process of colonialism helps to deprive the developed modernity of the third world society from both good and bad aspects. Now, this process has given way to the process of neocolonialism. Because of this new process, some pre-modern structures have been sucked into the whirlpool of western post-modernity. In this way, post-modernity without inheriting a mature modernity is becoming their destiny day by day, as if backwardness has caused a precocious form. The further contradiction is that in the painful tension between the ancients and the pioneers, in the cultural field, some classic conditions of a modernist art have been recreated. " (Eagleton: The Illusion of Postmodernism, p. 139)
Whether China already has the classic conditions of modernist art, this book is put on hold for the time being. What can be said here is that this condition has been formed since we realized the situation of our frame of reference-the unfinished mission of western modernism and the fantasy of post-modernism. Because, where consciousness shines, it is the beginning of redemption. The author of this book does not pretend to be part of this redemption effort. I can only be content to stay awake in the fog of conservatism and post-modernism. I firmly believe that, just as the conservative-post-modernism alliance once declared that China can and should bypass modernity and jump directly into post-modernism is a daydream, the statement that post-modernism is the fate of China's art is just a lie. Once upon a time, people were so obsessed with the Chinese dream that he could avoid the modernity proposition of industrialization, urbanization and socialization and go straight to the "post-industrial society" of informationization, localization and community. However, people are increasingly aware that China has been trying to bypass the past industrialization process, market rules, rational management, procedural rationality, the principle of rule of law, and even the legitimacy foundation of governance, but the result is a hard core of modernity! The setbacks we have encountered in the process of social modernization and cultural modernity can be traced back to our ideology and habits of action, and we have not really established the basic position of subjectivity-the essence of modernity that Hegel thinks. The interruption of culture and the loss of meaning (we have twists and turns in dealing with traditional and modern issues), the indifference of society, the false unity of society that is not based on real individual subjectivity, and the lack of personality illustrate the following social facts: because we are clumsy in dealing with the relationship between tradition and modernity, "innovation" needs the government to promote it as a political slogan; Because we haven't really established a modern independent moral foundation of self-selection and self-responsibility, "honesty" has actually become the biggest problem when a country with a culture of 5,000 years encounters modern market rules and new interpersonal relationships. Due to the strong Confucian tradition and the suppression of individualism by the ultra-left collectivism ideology in the 20th century, the imperfection of "personality" has always been the most explanatory ultimate reason for various social phenomena in China: due to the lack of personality, the whole society periodically falls into various "mass movements"; Because there is no individuality, the whole society is often under great undifferentiated pressure (in a sense, there is no pluralistic value system and its corresponding pluralistic lifestyle). So that people can say that a vast ocean of undifferentiated society (especially in rural areas) provides a steady stream of social resources for stubborn cultural conservatism; And a "non-centered" individual who has not yet formed the center of self-awareness, self-value orientation and self-moral commitment has just become the best hotbed of "decentralized", intoxicated, "anything is possible" and irresponsible postmodernism.