2014年考研《经济学人》：妙手点石成金 中英文对照
根据历年真题研究发现考研的阅读理解的文章一般都是从国外的期刊上摘抄下来的，像The Economist 《经济学家》、Newsweek 《新闻周刊》、Times《时代周刊》、Now York Times 《纽约时报》等，下面太奇考研英语辅导老师整理了《经济学人》阅读周刊，希望能对同学们的阅读带来更大的视野。The alchemist
妙手点石成金
A lifetime of art about art
为艺术的艺术而倾尽一生
Feb 23rd 2013 |From the print edition
And with this, he became a big fish
此画问世之后，他声名鹊起
ROY LICHTENSTEIN managed a neat trick. Though his cartoonish canvasses feature the pulpy imagery of comic strips and advertisements, every work is unmistakably his. He turned worthless visual clichés into valuable works of art. This mysterious alchemy—when does a mass-market image become something worthy of a museum?—preoccupied him for his entire career. The fruits of these rather cerebral labours are now on view at Tate Modern in London, where a big, world-touring retrospective of his work, co-organised with the Art Institute of Chicago, opens this week.
罗伊•李奇登斯坦【注2】手法高超。尽管他的卡通创作主要是在廉价连环漫画和广告方面，但每件作品都打上了他那鲜明的个人印记。他把毫无价值的陈腐视觉题材变成了珍贵的艺术品。他的整个事业生涯都献给了这种神奇的“点石成金之术”——让面向大众的美术作品登上博物馆的殿堂。本周，伦敦泰特现代艺术馆将和芝加哥艺术学院将联合举办一场大型环球回顾展，向世人展现了李奇登斯坦绞尽脑汁留下的艺术果实。
Born in New York in 1923, Lichtenstein began working at a time when the important painters were splattering and swooshing their emotions on canvas. His early abstract paintings bear the vital brushstrokes of this expressive era, but unmemorably so, and were duly forgotten. His breakthrough came in 1961 with “Look Mickey” (pictured), a painstaking oil reproduction of an illustration of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, complete with speech balloon and the Ben-Day dots of commercial printing. The painting is provocative (what makes it art?), but also visually arresting. Like most of Lichtenstein’s later work, this canvas has a seductive, easy appeal. Flat, cool and perfectly composed, it would look great over the couch.
李奇登斯坦于1923年出生在纽约。他走上艺术道路的时候，那些名画家正在帆布上挥毫泼墨，抒发自己的情感。那是一个富于表现力的时代，李奇登斯坦早期的抽象画带着充满活力的时代笔触，但却缺乏特色，理所当然地被人们遗忘了。1961 年，李奇登斯坦用油画《看哪，米奇!》(如图)取得了突破。他把一张《米老鼠和唐老鸭》的插画精心地用油画形式再现了出来，同时也融入了对话泡泡和商业印刷品中的小点构图。这幅油画存在一些争议(有人认为它算不上是艺术)，但确实引人注目。就像李奇登斯坦大部分后期作品一样，这幅帆布油画有一种夺人眼球的魔力——色调平和清爽、构图精妙，非常适合挂在沙发的上方。
“Is He the Worst Artist in the US?” asked Life magazine in 1964. Some wondered whether he was an artist at all. But unlike Andy Warhol, his most notorious Pop peer, Lichtenstein was not a fame-hound. His visual games were playful, not cynical. He worked quietly and contentedly in his New York studio, creating art about art until he died in 1997. The riddles of life left him inspired, not frustrated. Fittingly, his work still provides more questions than answers.
1964年，《生活》杂志以“李奇登斯坦是不是美国最糟糕的艺术家?”为题，撰文发问。甚至有人怀疑他根本不算艺术家。然而，和声名狼藉的波普艺术家安迪•霍沃尔不同，李奇登斯坦并非沽名钓誉之徒。他的作品带着调侃成份，却没有愤世嫉俗的意味。他一直在纽约的工作室里静静地、知足地工作，创作“艺术的艺术”，直到1997年辞世为止。生活充满了未知，他却并没有因此沮丧失意，反而从中汲取了灵感。确切地说，他的作品留给我们更多的是思考，而不是现成的答案。
译者注：
1.波普艺术(Pop Art)，又称普普艺术，是一个探讨通俗文化与艺术之间关连的艺术运动。波普艺术试图推翻抽象表现艺术并转向符号，商标等具象的大众文化主题。波普艺术这个字目前已知的是由1956年英国艺术评论家罗伦斯·艾伟(Laurence Alloway)所提出。
波普艺术同时也是一些讽刺，市侩贪婪本性的沿伸。简单来说，波普艺术是当今较底层艺术市场的前身。波普艺术家大量复制印刷的艺术品造成了相当多评论。早期某些波普艺术家力争博物馆典藏或赞助的机会。并使用很多廉价颜料创作，作品不久之后就无法保存。这也引起一些争议。1960年代，波普艺术的影响力量开始在英国和美国流传，造就了许多当代的艺术家。后期的波普艺术几乎都在探讨美国的大众文化。
从意识形态和社会发展的背景来看，波普艺术在1960年代来反抗当时的权威文化和架上艺术，不但具有对传统学院派的反抗，也同时具有否定现代主义艺术的成份，虚无主义、无政府主义是波普艺术的精神核心。
波普艺术特殊的地方在于它对于流行时尚有相当特别而且长久的影响力。不少服装设计，平面设计师都直接或间接的从波普艺术中取得灵感。
2. Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, and others. He became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described Pop Art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".
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