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Book: Ways of Seeing
Quotes of Book: Ways of Seeing
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  1. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.
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  2. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.
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  3. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
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  4. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.
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  5. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    {...} For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, can now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did. Understandably, the masses remain uninterested and sceptical.
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  6. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction.
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  7. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety. Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.
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  8. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner."
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  9. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    The happiness of being envied is glamour.
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  10. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.
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  11. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical.You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
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  12. John Berger _ Ways of Seeing

    This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle : partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself... ... In no other culture has the artist been thought of in this way. Why then in this culture? We have already referred to the exigencies of the open art market. But the struggle was not only to live. Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.... ...Every exceptional work was the result of a prolonged successful struggle. Innumerable works involved no struggle. There were also prolonged yet unsuccessful struggles. {P.104}
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