A Research On Art Reception In The Context Of Consumer Culture

Consumer culture, as a major cultural form in consumer society, has emerged with the arrival of modern consumer society in the West. It originated in America in 1920s and was spread to Europe. Promoted by globalization, it sweeps every corner of the earth. Since 1980s, and especially Deng Xiaoping’s "South Tour Speeches," China’s economic construction has been accelerated, and market economy has been developed efficiently, which give a rise to a profound and dramatic social transformation. The society has changed from "production oriented" to "consumption oriented," during which, consumer culture dominates cultural forms, and gradually impacts all aspects of contemporary society, especially culture and arts. Based on a careful analysis in, criticism on, and reference to the fruits of culture study in related fields and relevant achievement, this dissertation means to have an exploration on activities of art reception through culture study by taking art reception as a research target so as to systematically reveal and track the happenings and undergoing of art reception in the context of consumer society.The thesis discusses the general picture of consumer culture, art reception, and art reception in the context of consumer culture. Consumer culture constitutes the essence of consumer society. The essence is the fusion of consumption and culture, which is specifically embodied as culture to be consumptive and consumption to be culture. The basic features of consumer culture are symbol consumption, daily life aestheticism, popularization and individuality coexistence. And the essential conditions of its historical formation are mainly consist of rich material base, brand new consumption concept, the boosting of mass media and the emergence of the subjects of consumer society and diversified consumption space filled with consumer behavior. The interpretation of multi-perspective art reception are composed of meaning pursuit centered around artist, meaning questioning centered around artistic work, free receiver centered around free reading and focusing on the influence of outer elements. Consumer culture involves in all aspects of art reception, which characterizes contemporary art reception with consumptive, liberated, life-oriented and sense-loaded qualities.The reception of artistic activities is an organic unity consisting of the subject of art reception, the objects of art reception, the means of art reception and the effect of art reception. Based on the previous general description, then the thesis will discuss these four aspects respectively from the perspective of consuming culture.The utilitarian features of recipients’ aesthetic taste are prominent, which present various development trends:diversified, vogue, sentimentalized and popularized. The recipients may also take entertainment, the moment in time and fashion publicity as the standards of art reception in order to cater to the consumption of reality today.The art reception subject shows an enlargement of target group in consumer culture context, a highlight of the recipient’s subjectivity, changes of the recipient’s aesthetics tastes and standards. With the strong intervention of consumption factors, art recipients are enlarged to a new group, mainly composed of the elites, the public and art brokers. Changes such as recipients turn to be the participatory original creators and recipients as the public has been crowned as god, which has fully manifested the subjectivity of recipients. As for the reception of art objects, since in the context of consuming culture, dramatic changes have occurred in art conceptions like the commercialization and open-pluralistic characteristics of returning to life,artworks,as objects, have changed accordingly:artworks concern people’s daily life and their humanity and introduce ready-made daily objects to works,with the content forming in a secular trend;the states and artistic approaches have shown the basic qualities of splendidness, colorfulness and flexibility.The art reception mode from the perspective of consumer culture generally changes to nowadays life -toward art reception mode from the traditional attentive observing one. The substantial transform specifically characterizes in the change of subject’s attitude from distance reception to zero distance reception, the change of reception process from deep -level reception to slight reception, and the change of experiencing mode from traditional introspective experience to the extinctive sensible sense experience.The penetration and infusion of consumer culture into artistic receptive activity highlight the entertainment effect of art reception. Although the cognitive effect of art is still existing,it turns into the self -identification of human subject and cognitive of simulated world instead of the factual perception about nature and society.The enlightenment effect initiative led by traditional art reception has been gradually weakened in consumer culture. This dissertation not only makes a general discussion macroscopically about art reception in the context of consumer culture, but also offers an in-depth explanation microscopically.In the process of approaching and solving this topic, the author put forward some original insights and creative ideas in addition to an analysis of related concepts, theories, implications and correlations. The dissertation has also clarified some ambiguities and scientific principles and notions, which deepens the research in this filed.