旅行的艺术:艺术 Ⅶ 令人眼界大开的艺术-6

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那个澳大利亚人的抱怨在团队中是少见的。我们中的大多数人听完索非娅的解说后，都怀着一种重新建立起来的敬意——对于凡·高和他画过的那片风景的敬意。但是我突然想起帕斯卡尔一句尖刻的名言，早在凡·高到法国南部的几百年前，他就说出这样的话了：

The complaints of the Australian man were unusual in the group. Most of us left Sophie's lecture with a new-found reverence both for Van Gogh and for the landscapes he had painted. But my enthusiasm was troubled by the memory of an exceptionally acerbic maxim that Pascal had penned two centuries before Van Gogh's southern journey:

绘画是多么地虚荣，它使我们不去赞美事物本身，而兴奋地赞美绘画所体现出来的与事物的相似性。

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

——《沉思录》

Pensées , 40

令人尴尬的是，在我还没发现凡·高对普罗旺斯的描绘前，我并不那么欣赏普罗旺斯这个地方。但是，在意欲嘲讽艺术爱好者的同时，帕斯卡尔的箴言却有可能忽略了重要的两点。如果我们设想所有画家所做的就是精确地再现他们眼前的图景，而我们赞叹这样一幅绘画作品，一幅描绘了一个我们知道却并不喜欢的地方，这听起来荒谬而虚伪。如果这些画家是精确地再现他们眼前的图景，那么在一幅画中我们将要赞叹的对象便只是画家的技巧和他本人的声名了。这样说来，或许帕斯卡尔说的绘画无用论的确没错。但是，如同尼采所言，画家并不单纯地再现，他们有所选择，有所强调，同时他们还致力于表现他们眼中的真实，因而值得让人真心喝彩。

It seemed awkwardly true that I had not admired Provence much before I had come across its depiction in Van Gogh's work. But, in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal's maxim was in danger of skirting two important points. To admire a painting that depicts a place we know but don't like sounds absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them. If that were true, then all we could admire in a painting would be the technical skills involved in the reproduction of an object and the glamorous name of the painter, in which case, we would have little difficulty in agreeing with Pascal's description of painting as a vain pursuit. But, as Nietzsche knew, painters do not merely reproduce. They select and highlight, and they are accorded genuine admiration in so far as their version of reality seems to bring out valuable features of it.

而且，即便我们所赞美的关于一个地方的图画不在眼前，我们也不必像帕斯卡尔暗示的那样，恢复我们对这个地方的漠然。欣赏的能力可以从艺术转向（现实）世界。我们会发现许多事物，最初画布上的图景让我们感到愉悦，而后我们在画作所描绘的那个地方喜欢上它们。就像看了凡·高画的柏树之后，我们更知道如何欣赏柏树。

Furthermore, we do not have to resume our indifference to a place once the painting of it that we have admired is out of sight, as Pascal hints we might. Our capacity to appreciate can be transferred from art to the world. We can find things that delight us on a canvas first but then later welcome them in the place where the canvas was painted. We can continue to see cypresses beyond Van Gogh's paintings.