Art as Cultural Identity in Modern Nation-States

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Modern nation-states developed a system that ensured the identity of their people by way of constructing an ideology of'nation' as a self-purposed organism. This ideology of nation-states also organized the institution of art. But because the very notion of nation-state as organism is taken from that of art, the role of art was not simply institutional in modern nation-states.In Japan, modernization awoke a nationalistic reaction in the 1880's, as seen in the privileging of Nihonga by Okakura Tenshin. However, this was in fact the introduction of an Occidental idea of art, that is, art as a form of national self-assertion. On the other hand, the typically Japanese (and not Chinese) tradition in which the art was removed from socio-political life urged some artists to find their art as a counterbalance to the Occidentalization of the nation. It was certainly true in the case of Natsume Soseki. Art as cultural identity thus bifurcated into two functions(an organic model of the nation-state, and a reference to the innate (at the same time artificial) self. However, at that very moment when art acquired these two roles, the historical attitude towards art began its diffusion, resulting in another phase of the modern concept of art : art had become no more a monument of any other organism than of itself. It was now a genre that provided museographical documents for the autonomous science of art.Ultimately, national identity found its course increasingly outside of the domain of art, especially in the area of mass communication. In the end, explicit reference to the'nation'persists in art, but only as a caricature of regionalism.