Summary

In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artistic practice of artists such as Canova, the performances raise interesting questions of how aesthetics worked when set in a commercial framework. The article discusses the problem of beauty faced by entertainers and spectators when art was reenacted for money. The experience of beauty was central to aesthetic theory and to living pictures. However, it remains unclear whether commercial living pictures was about beauty in art or about good-looking women. A possible conclusion is that it was about both, and that the aesthetic theory behind the tableaux was a theory created for a male visual culture, in which the male gaze’s consumption of female bodies was self-evident while dressed in arguments of truth and beauty, confirming a social order in which a certain right look was ascribed to men.

概括

在 1840 年代，瑞典和芬兰掀起了一股对生活照片或生动场景的小热潮作为商业娱乐。只需支付一张门票，公众就可以体验由现场演员表演的古代和当代雕塑家（如卡诺瓦和托瓦尔森）的艺术作品。基于 Winckelmann 的美学理论和 Canova 等艺术家的艺术实践，这些表演提出了强烈的艺术价值主张，提出了美学在商业框架中如何运作的有趣问题。这篇文章讨论了当艺术为了金钱而重演时，演艺人员和观众所面临的美问题。美的体验是美学理论和生活图片的核心。然而，目前尚不清楚商业生活图片是关于艺术美还是关于漂亮女性。一个可能的结论是它是关于两者的，以及背后的美学理论tableaux是为男性视觉文化创建的理论，其中男性对女性身体的消费是不言而喻的，同时穿着真与美的争论，证实了一种将某种正确的外观归因于男性的社会秩序。