新兴世界的文化自信 历史短口气不短

About 100 years ago, Pablo Picasso set off to the Musée du Trocadéro in Paris to study some plaster casts of Romanesque sculpture. Legend has it that, once inside the museum, he took a wrong turn. He ended up in a room of African masks. Picasso’s false move changed the way he looked at the world. He went back to his studio and made some changes to a painting he had been working on.

大约在100年前，毕加索(Pablo Picasso)动身前往巴黎人类学博物馆(Musée du Trocadéro)学习一些罗马式雕塑的石膏模型。按照后人的传说，毕加索进入博物馆后，拐错了弯，最后进入一间非洲面具的陈列室。毕加索走错了路，却改变了他看待世界的方式。他回到自己的工作室，对他一直采用的绘画方式作出了一些改变。

It was a group portrait of five prostitutes, looking defiantly at the viewer. Picasso changed three of the women’s faces into something that resembled the masks he had just seen. And with those few brush strokes, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” upset the course of 20th-century art. It was painting’s “African moment”, when artists turned their back on the academic strictures and barren themes of western art history, and re-found the energy and simplicity that had been lost over the centuries.

这是一幅由5个妓女的肖像构成的画作，画中人物挑衅地注视着观赏者。毕加索把其中3张女性的脸换成了与他见过的面具类似的样子。在几笔笔触的作用下，《亚维农的少女》(Les Demoiselles d'Avignon)搅乱了20世纪的艺术进程。这是绘画界的“非洲时刻”，这一刻艺术家放弃了学术上的狭窄以及西方艺术史上沉闷无趣的主题，再次找到了已经消失了几个世纪的活力和质朴。

In the changed world of the 21st century, that story already sounds ridiculous. Globalisation has shrunk the cultural and business worlds, while the rapid dissemination of material unleashed by new technologies means there are no wrong turnings any more, just the frenetic and relentless criss-crossings of more and more information superhighways.

在时过境迁的21世纪，这个故事听起来有些荒唐。全球化缩小了文化和商业世界，新技术释放的材料被迅速传播，这意味着不会再有拐错的弯，而只会有在越来越多的信息高速公路上狂热而无情的纵横交错。

There are ever fewer discoveries to be made by the established cultural superpowers as they ransack the rest of the world’s artistic traditions. In London alone, there is art, theatre and cinema on offer from all over the world on a weekly basis. Divergent literary forms cross-fertilise to form new hybrids: you find magical realism set in the suburbs of Paris, satirical haikus bouncing around the internet, the taut prose of the great mid-century American authors used to describe village life in central Asia.

随着老牌文化大国不断探寻世界其他地区的艺术传统，它们的发现越来越少。仅在伦敦，每周便有来自世界各地的艺术、戏剧和电影可供选择。百花齐放的文学形式在相互影响下形成新题材：你能发现巴黎郊区的魔幻现实主义布景，互联网上颇为流行的讽刺俳句，以及本世纪中期伟大美国作家创作的齐整散文被用来形容中亚乡村生活。

The countries that constitute the emerging markets of the world — defined for these purposes by the World Bank Atlas categorisation of a gross national income per capita of less than $12,746 — are, in many cases, already leading players on the world’s arts scene.

在很多情况下，构成新兴市场的那些国家，已经是世界艺术舞台上的主角了。世界银行(World Bank)的全球发展地图将人均国民收入低于12746美元的国家定义为新兴国家。

Their economies may be playing catch-up with the world’s most developed nations, but their cultural offerings are already there. It is inconceivable to think of a global cultural discussion without reference to African literature, Asian cinema or the visual art scene of the Americas.

新兴国家的经济也许还在追赶世界上最为发达的国家，但它们的文化产品已经赶上了发达国家。如果一场全球文化讨论没有提到非洲文学、亚洲电影或者美洲视觉艺术，那简直是不可想象的。

The reasons for this self-confident blooming over the course of the past century are manifold. Some are related to Picasso’s “African moment”. Artists are always in need of formal refreshment, if only to react against their own traditions. As they began to travel, they encountered alien cultures, which in turn influenced their own work. The new mass media helped to spread the word.

关于百年来这种自信绽放的解释有很多。一些原因与毕加索的“非洲时刻”有关。艺术家总是需要形式上的新鲜补充，即便只是为了反抗他们本身的传统。当开始旅行时，他们会遇到异国文化，这反过来会影响他们自己的作品。新的大众媒体有助于传播讯息。

Each country, too, has developed its own popular culture tradition. For years, India has been the biggest film-producing country in the world, with roughly double the output of US movies. Bollywood blockbusters traditionally have been treated with disdain as “bad girl, good girl, bad guy, good guy, romance (with no kisses), tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama”.

每个国家也会发展自己的流行文化传统。多年来，印度一直是世界上最大的电影出品国家，其电影产量几乎是美国的两倍。宝莱坞大片通常会被轻视为“坏女孩、好女孩、坏男人、好男人、浪漫（没有接吻）、眼泪、爆笑、打斗、追逐、情节剧”的代名词。

But that very quote comes not from a patronising westerner, but from India’s own Satyajit Ray, the country’s most distinguished director, who helped to form a “parallel cinema” movement in the 1950s that produced beautifully crafted works that found respect all over the globe.

但是，这种描述并非来自傲慢的西方人，而是出自印度最著名的导演萨蒂亚吉特•雷伊(Satyajit Ray)之口。上世纪50年代，雷伊帮助造就了“并行电影”(Parallel Cinema)运动，该运动带来的精美作品赢得了全球的尊重。

Each nation has mirrored this bifurcation between a vigorous, accessible and profitable cultural sector, and one, often subsidised by governments, that champions more difficult and ambitious work. The best of these offerings find cultish box office success far outside the country of their origin: the small gems of Iranian cinema, the visually sumptuous movies of the Chinese new wave, the melancholic masterpieces of eastern Europe — all are avidly followed by an international audience.

每个国家都有这种分化现象：一方面是充满活力、普通人喜闻乐见、有利可图的文化产业，另一方面是往往由政府资助、以更难懂和更加雄心勃勃的作品为代表的文化领域。这些作品中最优秀的代表会在本国以外取得丰厚的票房成功：伊朗电影佳作、中国新一代视觉盛宴型电影、东欧忧郁系杰作——这一切都受到国际观众的热情追捧。

The art market, that shrewd and volatile performance indicator of cultural preferences, has not been slow to cast its voracious eye over emerging nations. A couples of decades ago, examples of the best Chinese contemporary art could be purchased for between $20,000 and $30,000 a piece. Those prices increased spectacularly in the intervening period, reaching respectable, if not quite Picasso-esque, levels: an oil on paper landscape by Wu Guanzhong sold for a record $23.5m in November 2011.

艺术市场是有关文化偏好的精明而易波动的表现指标，在将贪婪的目光投向新兴国家时从不迟钝。大约20年前，中国最好的当代艺术作品可能以每幅2万至3万美元买到手。自那以来，这些作品的价格大幅提高，达到了相当高的水平，即便还赶不上毕加索作品的身价：2011年11月，吴冠中的一幅风景油画以创纪录的2350万美元售出。

The growing market for Chinese contemporary art is a good indicator of what the developed world looks for in the arts of the emerging nations: not only novelty value, but also a feeling that the art is helping to define those countries’ sense of nationhood. Often the artists have to work on forbidden themes and in defiance of repressive governments.

日益增长的中国当代艺术市场，很好地表明了发达世界在新兴国家艺术中所寻找的东西：不仅在于新奇价值，还有一种艺术正在帮助界定这些国家的民族认同感的感觉。艺术家往往不得不挖掘被禁的主题，无视政府的压制。

Much of that sense of danger and existential heft has disappeared from the art of the developed world, which becomes tied down in ever more internal formal dialogues. The art and literature of those countries that are still finding their way towards greater economic prosperity and civic maturity feel like it matters. There is no greater allure for any art-lover than that.

此类危险感以及存在的凝重感大部分已从发达世界的艺术中消失（后者越来越拘泥于内向的形式对话）。在那些仍然向着更大的经济繁荣和更成熟的公民社会摸索着前进的国家，艺术和文学给人的感觉是它们是重要的。对艺术爱好者来说，没有比这更大的诱惑了。