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 发表: 2004-09-03 00:45:12 人气:1414  
Beijing Forum Figure:Professor St. Clair from Cambridge: the Symbolic Meaning of the Temple of Parthenon
When the Athens Olympic still remains as one of the most hotly discussed issue this summer, Professor William St. Clair brought us the refreshing and up-to-date discussion over the symbolic meaning of the Temple of Parthenon. His topic was well paid attention to among the art sub-forum and his value seriously scrutinized by participating scholars.
Currently a researcher from Cambridge, Professor St. Clair was capable to discover whatever he is interested, thanks to his position and relative research facilities. He chooses the topic of the symbolic meaning of the Temple of Parthenon because he believes that Parthenon was in itself only a piece of architecture. It was generations of conquerors that entitled it with rich meaning that embodying the latter’s achievements as winners and conquerors.
“They (conquerors in history) want it because it is such a wonderful building. They want to thereby confirm that ‘I am the conqueror. I am the most powerful man’”.
20 minutes antecedent to our interview with Professor St. Clair, he mentioned in his presentation that there grows a trend among artistic collecting and museums of consumer culture. Museums tend to make some artistic items consumers presumably wanted to appreciate. Obviously the latter’s taste was in a large part influenced by mass culture.
“The curators should understand their position and not giving up to mass culture,” said him during the later interview. He further added that “we can have consumer culture in fashion trend but not with our believes of artistic appreciation.”
When mentioning pseudo-environmental effect that mass media created for modern minds, Professor St. Clair agreed that “fine art counteracts consumer culture. However, consumer culture is not defined by consumers themselves.”
The Cambridge history research raised his point concerning the artistic items being stolen by western so-called explorer during the early part of last century as “some deeds that appearing liberal are in them false nationalism”. Such point won supports among participating scholars, especially among Chinese scholars. So we raised this question during the interview as how Professor St. Clair evolved such point of view concerning contemporary Chinese art history.
“I studied Greek literature when I was young students like you. History is playing such an important role both in my study and my life. As my research goes on, the different experience of different nations during history development entered my research scope and that is how I began to be aware of this kind of issue.”
It is beyond disputes that under the global context, we young students are unforgivable if we put Chinese contemporary history overhead for the latter recorded the harshness composed with tears and struggle during the past 100 years. Professor St. Clair from Cambridge University provided us maybe one of the best reminder of the time: those are purely false nationalism.
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