The Changes Of The Ways Of Watching From The Modern Times To The Postmodern Age

Usually, when facing to an artwork, we are intoxicated with it, but few times could we pay attention to the ways that we get to watch it. But now due to the age of image, the visual culture and the jams which caused by them in the real world, we have to face with and start to research the questions of the vision. However, it means an opportunity to the art that the questions in daily life explode the researches of vision in the art field. And the ways how we watch is one question of them.This article compares the ways of watching in the course from modern times to the postmodern ages, and gets the conclusion that the different contexts of times make different ways of watching at artworks. Based on this viewpoint, the paper makes rethink of the ways to watching in the present age.Chapter one of these papers starts from the course from the modern times to the post age and the meanings of the ways of watching. It firstly discusses the course that the modern times turns to postmodern ages briefly, and after explaining the meaning and the range of the ways of watching, it points out that the ways of watching is not only the behaviors our eyes act but also the ways our mind works. At last this chapter introduces the tight relationship between art and the watching ways. Chapter two analyses that in the modern times, the most three important characters of the ways of watching are single focus, continuity and turning to the mind of human. While Chapter three discusses that two-dimensional, fragmentariness and carnival of the sensory are the three main trends of the ways of watching in the postmodern ages. What inferred in Chapter four is that after rethinking our ways of watching, some ideal ways of watching are promoted: the attitude of visual intersubjectivity is to balance the active and the passive when we watch, and the viewpoints of esthetic contemplation from Lao Tzu is to harmony between the affective and the rational. At the end of the article the fifth chapter is a short summary of the whole article.From the article we can see that every way of watching symbolizes a different kind of culture. When we rethink our ways of watching in the course of modern or postmodern society, we also query these two kinds of culture. Meanwhile, exploring a new available way of watching is equal to establishing a new kind of culture. And the purpose of introspection is just to set a better life.