Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford University Press, 2003

Cynthia Freeland

Chapter 3
Cultural crossings
Culture travels, like people. There are Chinese and Zen gardens in cities from Sydney to Edinburgh
to San Francisco. ‘World Music’ is enormously popular: the latest disco style breezily combines
flamenco with jazz and Gaelic traditions. Dance troupes from Africa and South America routinely
perform overseas. It would be impossible to disentangle strands of influence in the spaghetti
western, samurai film, Hollywood action flick, Indian adventure story, and Hong Kong cinema. In
the modern world, no culture, however ‘primitive’ and remote, remains isolated. The Huichol
Indians, who live in mountain villages of Mexico, make their masks and rukuri votive bowls for
peyote rituals using glass beads imported from Japan and Czechoslovakia.
文化就像人一样传播。从悉尼到爱丁堡再到旧金山，都有中国园林和禅宗园林。”“世界
音乐”非常受欢迎：最新的迪斯科风格轻快地将弗拉门戈与爵士乐和盖尔语传统相结合。
来自非洲和南美洲的舞蹈团经常在海外演出。在意大利西部片、武士电影、好莱坞动作片
印度冒险故事和香港电影中，不可能分清各种影响因素。在现代世界，没有一种文化，无
论多么“原始”和遥远，仍然是孤立的。生活在墨西哥山村的惠乔尔印第安人，用从日本
和捷克斯洛伐克进口的玻璃珠制作面具和鲁库里祈祷碗，用于佩约特仪式。

Can art break down barriers among cultures? John Dewey thought so; he wrote in his 1934
book Art as Experience that art is the best possible window into another culture. Insisting that
‘art is a universal language’, Dewey urged us to strive to achieve the internal experience of
another culture. He thought this required an immediate encounter, and not studying ‘external
facts’ about geography, religion, and history: ‘Barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt
away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more
efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude’.
 艺术能打破文化间的障碍吗？约翰·杜威是这样认为的；他在 1934 年出版的《作为经验的
艺术》一书中写道，艺术是进入另一种文化的最佳窗口。 杜威坚持“艺术是一种通用语
言”，他敦促我们努力实现另一种文化的内在体验。他认为这需要立即接触，而不是研究
地理、宗教和历史的“外部事实”：“当我们进入黑人或波利尼西亚艺术的精神时，障碍
被消除了，限制性偏见被消除了。这种无意识的融合远比由推理产生的变化更有效，因为
它直接进入态度”。
Dewey’s belief that ‘the esthetic quality is the same for Greeks, Chinese, and Americans’ suggests
that he is mystifying our experience of art as direct, wordless appreciation. This smacks of
modernist searches for a universal formal quality of ‘Beauty’. Indeed, Clive Bell, the art critic,
emphasized the value of Significant Form, rather than any particular content, in ‘primitive’ art.
But to equate Dewey’s approach with Bell’s would be unfair, since Dewey knew that ‘the
language of art has to be acquired’. He did not define art as Beauty or Form, but said instead that
it is ‘the expression of the life of the community’. I like this definition, though I would go further
than Dewey in saying we must know ‘external’ facts before trying to acquire the ‘internal’
attitude of appreciation for another community’s art.
杜威认为“希腊人、中国人和美国人的审美品质是一样的”，这表明他将我们的艺术体验
神秘化为直接的、无言的欣赏。这有点现代主义者对“美”的普遍形式的追求。事实上，
艺术评论家克莱夫·贝尔（Clive Bell）强调了“原始”艺术中重要形式的价值，而不是任何
特定的内容。但将杜威的方法等同于贝尔的方法是不公平的，因为杜威知道“艺术的语言
必须习得”。他没有将艺术定义为美或形式，而是说它是“社区生活的表达”。我喜欢这
个定义，尽管我会比杜威更进一步地说，在试图获得欣赏另一个社区艺术的“内部”态度
之前，我们必须了解“外部”事实。