Over dinner on a bitterly cold January night in Beijing, I asked Cordula Bischoff, the Dresden-based curator of “The Art of the Enlightenment”, which object in the exhibition best represents its message. Without hesitating, she pointed to a silhouette print in the advance catalogue. The work, attributed to Johann Heinrich Lips, depicts Voltaire, the French philosopher, holding a lantern that shines a light outward beyond the picture frame. “He is carrying the light and leading the visitor out of the exhibition,” she said. “It tells everything.” Bischoff’s counterpart, Chen Yu, a curator at the National Museum, nodded in agreement. “This picture is a metaphor of the Enlightenment,” he said. “The European Enlightenment is still influencing people everywhere in the world. Chinese people are still enjoying its fruits.”
True enough, there is more to China and the Enlightenment than meets the eye.
Fine art—itself something of an Enlightenment creation—reflected in full the shifting panorama of 18th-century Europe: the opulence of the monarchic courts; the rise of the public sphere; scientific advances; fascination with history, nature, and faraway places; the worldly questioning of religion and superstition; the emergence of a more individualistic sense of self, along with the darker psychic residue of disenchantment and aimlessness that modern life would bring in its tow. The Age of Reason offered art not only fresh subject matter, but also a new purpose and organisation. It celebrated the artist as an autonomous visionary and witnessed the rise of new public institutions—the exhibition gallery, the concert hall, art criticism—all of which continue to frame the terms of engagement between art and its audience today.
Read the rest here.
The exhibition's site is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment