Art and Subject in Spaces of Modernity: Panorama, Museum, Concert Hall and City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

摘要

In the conception of both modern centered subject and post-modern de-centered subject, and theanalysis of modern and post-modern life and society, their nature and being are often depicted and conceptualizedusing artistic, aesthetic terms and metaphors. While the long term flourishing of artistic conceptionsof subject, subjectivity and its life, the concepts related to the Art and Aesthetics―for example,canon, autonomy, purification, genius, originality―have been criticized and scrutinized in the various disciplines.The purpose of this paper is to figure out the relations between artwork and subject in the variousmodern spaces : panorama, museum, concert hall, city space, referring to the writings about art, especiallymuseum and artwork, by Theodor Adorno, Marcel Proust, Paul Vale′y, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, inorder to find a toehold to approach the questions of why the artistic metaphors and art remain so significantin the era when the Art lost its influence of which Plato expressed fear, and what problems and paradoxesthe subject of modernity and post-modernity confront, when the Art has transformed its nature andposition in the age of mechanical reproduction.The panoramas of the nineteenth century which exhibit the panoramic view of city transform city intoartwork and commodity which are gazed at and consumed, and in turn this means blurring the boundarybetween artwork and commodity. Building holy place of art, the museum guards artworks against the secularcapitalistic world, but Vale′y detects the capitalistic world and city penetrate the museum. If city andmuseum cannot be distinguished in their constituting principles, subject which is conceived using artisticmetaphor and who lives in modern or post-modern society (city) suffers the same fate as art and artwork.