In 1917, Duchamp named a ready-made urinal "Fountain" as his own work. This practice seems to have broken down the technical threshold of art creation and the aesthetic threshold of art viewing, liberating both the artist and the viewer. Duchamp gave the artist and the viewer equal importance, even saying that "the viewer creates the painting" and "the viewer forms the art museum" ([French] Pierre Cabana, Interviews with Duchamp, translated by Wang Rui Yun, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2001). Duchamp's approach and statement greatly influenced contemporary art after the 1960s, and Beuys directly shouted, "Everyone is an artist." However, hearing these inciting slogans of Duchamp and Beuys, which imply democratic emancipation, we also think the other way around: the audience Duchamp boasts may also be a rabble, and "everyone is an artist" may also mean "everyone is not an artist". This is how the famous American art critic Clement Greenberg sees Duchamp's ready-made works as vulgar art to please the vulgar, according to his artistic standards. And in Kant after Duchamp, the famous Belgian art historian Thierry de Duve traces the artistic concepts of Duchamp and Beuys back to the French Salon Exhibition, the birthplace of Kant's aesthetics and modern art in the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. Kant's Critique of Judgment, in which he assumes that everyone has a sense of aesthetic "commonality," was prepared by the writings of French art critics Roger de Piles and Dubos in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. "They believed that only amateurs had the right and ability to make aesthetic judgments about art" de Dever continues: "Since the end of the seventeenth century, this right was applied at least in the French salon exhibitions, when the practice of French painters and sculptors (although considered by the jury to be part of art), had to be opened to the public every year to the interesting judgment of amateurs." ([Bi] Thierry de Dever, Kant after Duchamp, translated by Shen Yubing, Zhang Xiaojian, and Tao Zheng, Jiangsu Fine Arts Press, 2014 edition)
In eighteenth-century France, the Salon Exhibition held by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was the first major art exhibition in Europe that was regularly, openly, and free of charge to all the public in a secular venue, aiming to break the closure and monopoly of the old craft guilds and allow the public to judge artworks, becoming an important part of French public life and the birthplace of modern art. In the Salon exhibition, the art public in the modern sense was born. So, was the salon audience a rabble or a public with a common sense of aesthetics for all? Or did the salon public have a different connotation? Thomas Crow's masterpiece Painters and Public Life inEighteenth-Century Paris, a leading American art historian and representative of the New Art History, explores the production of the salon public in eighteenth-century France from these questions. In the introductory section, Thomas Krogh asks, "What transformed the audience (audience) into the public-a community that played a legitimate and rightful role in justifying artistic practice and giving value to works of art?"
II
When it comes to the public sphere and the public in eighteenth-century France, Habermas has to be mentioned. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argues that eighteenth-century France was the primary origin of the bourgeois public sphere: "It was in the eighteenth century that France really had 'public opinion'." Habermas also speaks of the Salon exhibitions held by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in France, arguing that they allowed painters to liberate themselves from the guilds, courts and churches and to see painting as a free art; they also allowed artworks to transcend traditional experts and connect directly with a wide audience, while the emerging Salon critics turned "discussion into a means of mastering art "Soon, "magazines, first hand-copied newsletters, then printed monthly and weekly magazines, became tools of public criticism. In his essay "The Public Sphere," Habermas defines the public sphere, the public, in eighteenth-century France.
By "public sphere" we mean, first of all, a sphere of our social life in which things like public opinion can be formed. The public sphere is, in principle, open to all citizens. Part of the public sphere consists of various dialogues in which people who are private individuals come together and form a public. At that time, they are neither acting as business or professionals dealing with private behavior, nor as legitimate groups subject to the legal regulations of the state bureaucracy. When they dealt with issues of general interest in a non-coercive context, citizens acted as a group; this action therefore had the guarantee that they were free to assemble and combine, and free to express and publicize their opinions. (Habermas: The Public Sphere, translated by Wang Hui, in Wang Hui and Chen Yangu, eds.)
In Thomas Krogh's view, the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, especially the cultural public sphere of salon exhibitions and their publics, differed greatly from the ideal value-oriented "public sphere" and "public" defined by Habermas. There is a significant difference between the ideal value-oriented "public sphere" and "public" as defined by Habermas. In the introduction to his book Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Thomas Krogh focuses on the relationship between the actual salon audience and the ideal public. After 1737, as the Salon became a regular exhibition held every odd year, with a growing audience, and as the Salon became more influential in Parisian artistic life, "all those who had an established interest in the Salon were faced with the task of defining what kind of public the Salon formed. This proved to be no easy task. First of all, the French Salon audience was different from the public that used to watch paintings and sculptures in religious celebrations, royal ceremonies, festive celebrations and civic parades. The elegant art in these traditional celebrations was only occasionally presented as part of hierarchical political and religious rituals, and was entirely dominated by the upper echelons of society, with artists not working directly for the public, but first and foremost to satisfy the needs of the privileged few. In contrast, "the Salon was the first exhibition in Europe to present contemporary art regularly, publicly, and free of charge in a completely secular setting, and to stimulate an aesthetic response among a large group of people," meaning that the artworks in the Salon had a truly public character, and the Salon audience became, in a certain sense, the public as defined by Habermas. However, to refer to the salon audience as "the public" implies "a degree of meaningful consistency in attitudes and expectations: can the crowd in the Louvre be described as more than a temporary collection of completely heterogeneous individuals"? Citing the eighteenth-century British social critic and art critic PidansatdeMairobert's description and assessment of the French salon exhibitions of his time, Crowe finds that the actual salon audience as specified by Mairobert was heterogeneous and scattered, with a mix of men and women of different classes, such as rough artisans and great nobles wearing medals, fishmongers and noblewomen. They judged the salon paintings according to their own preferences with different purposes, but McRobert also claimed that the salon audience was a "public" with a free and democratic meaning. Krogh argues that such a mixed representation of the actual salon audience and the "public" as a totality of meaning was common in salon criticism of the time. If we restrict ourselves to a positivist historical approach and empirically reconstruct the emergence of the public in Parisian art based on the available literature, we also arrive at this split view, "the public was both ubiquitous and not a specific being.
Habermas's definition of "the public" hardly resolves the contradiction between the heterogeneous actual salon audience and the "public" as a totality of meaning. Unlike the positivist view of the salon audience as a heterogeneous and scattered group and the Habermasian view of the public sphere as an ideal public in the Enlightenment sense, Krogh uses discursive archaeology and genealogy in the Foucaultian sense to see the art audience as a discursive public in between, "characterizing a significant total of meaning by and for certain people. Significant totality". As long as there are claims to represent the public, the public will appear in some form and with some purpose, and "when enough people in the audience believe in this or that claim to represent the public, the public can become a major player in the history of art. The public sphere became what Foucault called a "discursiveformation," a field of discourse: a field of competing languages.
The emerging role of public space in the history of eighteenth-century French painting is closely related to the struggle over representation, language, symbols, and their use. The question was never whether the public, a problematic entity, should be consulted in matters of art, but rather who was a legitimate member of the public, who spoke on behalf of its interests, and which of the competing parties in artistic practice, or which parties, could claim its support. (Thomas Krogh, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris)
This genealogy and archaeology of the salon public as discourse is intended to uncover the complex discursive struggles, power operations, and conflicts of interest in the transformation of actual salon audiences into publics in eighteenth-century France and their impact on painters and painting, a process that must have been uneventful. Krogh mentions that Western art historians, influenced by JeanLocquin's classic work HistoryPaintinginFrancefrom1747to1785, argue that in LaFont's 1747 Between LaFont's famous Salon Review in 1747, "Reflections on Some Reasons for the Present State of French Painting," which called on Salon artists to move from creating private Rococo paintings to creating public history paintings that reflected public aspirations, and the success of David's public history painting "The Oath of the Horace Brothers" in 1785 in gaining public recognition, there was a smooth, unbroken line of consensus among officials, Salon painters, art critics, and the public on what constituted a painting that represented public values. A smooth, unbroken path of consensus among officials, salon painters, art critics, and the public on what represents public value in painting. Krogh's book does not seek to completely disprove this view, but rather to restore the rocky, tortuous path from salon audience to public.
In fact, Lafont's Salon reviews published in the name of the public in 1747 not only failed to gain the approval of the Academy officials and painters, but were roundly ridiculed and attacked by them. The Academy painters not only drew cartoons satirizing Lafont as an ignoramus, but also refused to submit their paintings for the Salon exhibition in protest. Tournehem, the leader of the Academy, was furious and thought that this view of Lafont's Salon review was a stupid idea, while Charles Coypel, the chief painter, completely denied that the Salon audience constituted the public: "I believe that the public changes twenty times a day in the Salon where these paintings are displayed. The paintings that the public admires at ten o'clock in the morning are openly censured by noon. ...... After hearing what they all think, you learn that it is not a real public, but only a herd of rogues, and we should not rely on that kind of public at all." ("Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris")
The reason why Lafont's advocacy of the public nature of painting was fiercely opposed by the officials of the Academy and the painters had to do with the political, economic and cultural conditions of France at that time. With the death of Louis XIV, the elite returned from Versailles to Paris to live a private and sensual life. In the 1840s, the court nobility and wealthy upper classes built a large number of luxurious public houses in Paris, requiring a large number of small decorative paintings, tapestry patterns and family portraits. The production of Rococo decorative paintings became a good way for academy painters to get rich, while creating the large public history paintings that Laffont called for in the name of the public was time-consuming and laborious without much pay. The actual audience of the Salon, mostly civilians, did not understand the serious public history paintings, and they were "so fragmented, disorganized and incoherent that they did not deserve the title of public". Moreover, the government and the Paris High Court were locked in the most serious confrontation since the stone-throwing movement of the twentieth century. The king and the high clergy suppressed the Jansenists, while the Supreme Court opposed this in the name of "constitution" and "liberty", and the judges of the High Court were called patriotic heroes against government tyranny by the public. The unofficial commentary, represented by Laffont's Salon Review, was able to sway public opinion and even implicitly encode politics in the aesthetic discourse of art. Lafont's Salon commentary, which criticized the excessive number of portraits exhibited in the Salon, but the portraits of High Court judges were not censured harshly because the judges were defenders of public tranquility and well-being, made officials more wary of these unofficial critics who spoke in the name of the public. In short, in the France of the 1840s, the salon audience did not acquire the public connotation and status that Laffont wanted to give it.
The transformation of the actual salon audience into a public in eighteenth-century France was circuitous, but it is undeniable that this public as discourse had come onto the stage with the salon exhibitions held by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which became the object of competition between the royal aristocracy, the government, the Academy, art critics, political dissidents and revolutionaries, and became the source of the modern art public.
IV
In the final chapter of his book Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Krogh offers a fascinating discussion of the relationship between David's paintings and public life and the public in French Paris before the French Revolution, from which we can see how the eighteenth-century salon audience eventually transformed into a defiant and radical public. The success of David's public history painting The Oath of the Brothers Horace, created in 1785, lies in the fact that it matched the political passions of the salon critics and the public. The painting was highly praised in Salon reviews written by anti-official political radicals, who saw the simplicity, rigidity, clumsiness, and even "errors" of the technique as a departure from the conventions of academic painting and a defiance of rules and traditions. The official conservatives smelled a danger in this public passion. According to Krogh.
The Oath of the Brothers Horace seems to impose a special concern on the viewer, or at least on the critics who watch it. They can only focus on its shortcomings, its mistakes, its defiance of tradition, its refusal to show every aspect of the painter's all-round talent. Beyond this concern, some members of the public have noticed these characteristics. The caution, anxiety and fear expressed by the conservative critics were accompanied by a sense that David had formed a sinister alliance with a public that was unaware of its own aspirations and interests. They felt that this new, yet-to-be-understood public was being attracted to those who violated its most cherished artistic values.
A.J. Gorsas, the future Girondean and revolutionary leader, was at this time the salon critic who celebrated the "errors" of David's painting, whose salon reviews were politically encoded in aesthetic discourse, and who was part of an intellectual circle that included Brissot, Marat and Jean-Louis Carra. radicals such as Brissot, Marat, and Jean-Louis Carra, who wrote some of the most influential radical political texts in the years leading up to the Revolution. Gorsas and Carra saw the rococo elegance of painting, dress, and linguistic expression as a false style that concealed the truth, reminding the public of the connection between a gentle aristocratic style and falsehood and evil, and that "the devils hid their true nature beneath a rococo sophistication that concealed greed, depravity, and tyranny. As mentioned earlier, the coding of Lafont's salon reviews of the 1840s ruled from the political struggle between the Paris High Court and the government, and the political coding in the salon reviews of Gorsas, Carra, and others was likewise related to the struggle between the High Court and the government. In 1777, the High Court seized upon Kara's accusations against then Finance Minister Kallona and refused to approve Kallona's fiscal reform plan, which led to the banishment of the High Court judges, an act that in turn caused popular unrest. Krogh argues that we cannot see the politically coded Salon commentaries of Gorsas, Carla and others as readings imposed on David only from the outside: "Pre-Revolutionary radicalism never actually left the cultural sphere, and we must keep this in mind if we want to understand the particular influence of David. The ideology on which its influence was based was shaped by two confrontations: on the one hand, the official cultural institutions (mainly the various academies), and on the other, the new cultural masses that these institutions gave little or no consideration to. The distinction between the culture ruled by the old regime and the needs and expectations of the large bourgeois audience was most evident in the public exhibitions. By 1777, the salon was no longer a refuge from social conflict and disorder; it seemed to have been transferred to the political sphere." On the eve of the Revolution, the Salon exhibition audience had become indistinguishable from the radical public outside the Salon exhibition, becoming representative of the political radicals intent on challenging the old system and even the French nation. At the end of the final chapter, Krogh concludes that the political in
By 1789, the majority of the Salon's audience had dominated the Parisian art world and placed its tenacious and indomitable winners in the irrefutable supremacy of their contemporaries. In the course of eighteenth-century history, we can trace the emergence of this public as a force of destruction and reorganization. The audience of the ...... salon never received positive recognition because they had no place among the networks defining the values and purposes of art, maintained by both the Academy and the State. But we can argue that when division began to become the organizing principle of the dominant art of the age, the public had arrived, because the once disenfranchised audience, by manifesting itself as an antagonistic public, had become dominant.
Returning to what Duchamp calls the art audience, to contemporary art, "the situation is the same today as it was then. Duchamp said that "the spectator creates the painting" and "the viewer forms the museum", and Beuys said that "everyone is an artist". The "audience", "viewer" and "everyone" can be traced back to the origin of the modern art public - the French salon audience in the 18th century. The "audience" in Duchamp's and Beuys's terms is also neither a heterogeneous and mixed audience at the level of empirical evidence, nor a free and equal ideal public at the level of value, but a public that is contested and given different connotations by various stakeholders as a discourse. In twentieth-century art, an "antagonistic public" emerged as a "force of destruction and reorganization," with artists such as Duchamp and Beuys claiming to be its spokesmen.
The birth of the modern art public began at this moment: the artist's reliance on any personal or elite coterie dictates began to be questioned, and a third variable was irreversibly introduced, named by the word "public". The public space, where parties competed for the right to public discourse, became the scene of modern art. Paradoxically, once a certain public discourse becomes absolutely dominant, and once art becomes completely identified with this single public discourse, art loses its vitality and enters a dead end. In Krogh's view, David's historical painting The Death of Mara, painted in 1793, was completely identified with the public political and cultural life of the Revolutionary period, and became a fervently worshipped memorial painting of the Revolution. The public space where parties competed for public discourse atrophied, and art was reduced to a political ritual with a pre-modern character. In the case of today's art, it is important to guard against the reduction of art to a single illustration of public political and cultural life and a commodity in commodity fetishism. Krogh argues that if the dynamic exchange of meaning between art and the public sphere is cut off, if the art audience is completely equated with a single discursive public, art loses its tension as a metaphor. Krogh is telling us that the dynamic public space in which parties can argue with each other is the key to the production of the modern art public as a third-party "variable," and that this dynamic public space and variable public are key elements of the production mechanism of modern art.
