Art as Cultural Identity in Modern Nation-States

现代民族国家发展了一种制度，通过将“民族”作为一个自我目的的有机体来构建意识形态，来确保其人民的身份。这种民族国家的意识形态也组织了艺术的制度。但是，由于民族国家作为有机体的概念是从艺术的概念中提取出来的，因此艺术在现代民族国家中的作用不仅仅是制度性的。在日本，现代化在19世纪80年代唤醒了民族主义的反应，如冈仓天心的《日本贺》。然而，这实际上是引进了一种西方的艺术观念，即艺术是民族自我主张的一种形式。另一方面，日本（而不是中国）的传统，即艺术被从社会政治生活中删除，促使一些艺术家找到他们的艺术作为一个平衡的民族的西化。在夏目漱石的情况下，这当然是正确的。因此，艺术作为文化身份分为两种功能（民族国家的有机模式，以及对先天（同时是人为的）自我的引用。然而，就在艺术获得这两种角色的时候，对艺术的历史态度开始扩散，导致了现代艺术概念的另一个阶段：艺术不再是任何其他有机体的纪念碑，而是艺术本身的纪念碑。它现在是一种为自主的艺术科学提供博物馆文献的流派。最终，民族认同越来越多地在艺术领域之外找到了自己的方向，特别是在大众传播领域。最后，明确提到“民族”仍然存在于艺术中，但只是作为一个讽刺的地区主义。

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.