The Art of the Other. the Paradox of Universality in Western Conceptions of ‘Japanese Art' (1860-1940)

The era of the rise of modernism involved the emergence of art as an autonomous and universal category. This paper argues that, given the universal claims of the category of art, it saw an expansion to Asia in general and Japan in particular. This expansion, shaped through various orientalist categories of ‘Asian’ or ‘Japanese’ similarity and commonality as juxtaposed to ‘the West’, helped to provide plausibility for modernist conceptions of art. It universalized the category of art by giving it a global meaning both in spatial and in temporal terms.

At the same time, this universalization meant that cultural hierarchies informed by western hegemony were threatened. This paper looks at the ways influential western observers of Japanese art between 1860 and 1940 dealt with this by contributing to the simultaneous universalization of the category of art and the particularization of the concept of ‘Japanese art’. This ‘paradox of universality’ involved a differentiation between on the one hand particular, local, traditional and most often historical realizations of what was nonetheless a universal category of art, and on the other hand its truly modern and advanced contemporaneous realizations of universality.

At the height of the modernizing movements in the west, Japan proved to be the site of an ‘exemplary expansion’ of the concept of art. Sociologically, this expansion served to a significant degree to communicate an understanding of western art as an autonomous and potentially universal yet practically bounded category, the emergence of which has been analyzed by, for instance, Bourdieu, Heinich and Luhmann.