John berger ways of seeing book
Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.Ways of Seeing is a four part BBC video series, created by John Berger and producer Mike Dibb in 1972. But we can never be certain in every case that someone-a veiled mind-isn’t playing us for suckers. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness-the will to believe-without which the experience of art cannot occur. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah.
John berger ways of seeing book professional#
Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Thanks for bringing up that article, Mark! I think the whole last paragraph deserves quoting (emp mine):Īrt forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims-the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Watch the whole BBC miniseries on YouTubeįiled Under: Notes on writing and drawing, Visual note-taking Tagged: art, art galleries, business, john berger, mind maps, painting, reproduction, ways of seeing.
Everyone is encouraged to join in.Īrt in the age of mechanical reproduction, indeed! Every level of merchandising was covered. It’s worse than a museum: at least in a museum you can buy a postcard or a book in the gift shop.Ĭontrast this with my experience at Maker Faire earlier in the day, where the idea was: come make things with us. You feel like a f*&%ing second-class citizen: You can look, but don’t touch.
All you can do is snap a bootleg shot on your camera phone. Regardless of how much you love the art, there’s nothing he can sell to you, there’s nothing you can buy into, no way for you to show your support or love for the work. Second, I find it alienating, as someone without the $10,000 to spend on art, to not be able to “own” or “buy into” or “take home” some part of the work. nature” or something cliched along those lines…įirst, the idea that anyone has $10,000 to spend on a piece of art boggles my mind. There was only a photocopy of the price list, along with some goofy map of the exhibit that related “culture vs.
John berger ways of seeing book free#
There was free beer, sure, but no artist’s statement, no postcards, nothing. I was with him and our wives at an opening in an art gallery in town last night and couldn’t get over how uncomfortable I felt about the whole thing. Our ideas about making art are very similar, but our business models couldn’t be more different! I’ve recently been going back and forth with an artist friend of mine about his fine-arts-based world (where his collectors value the original, one-of-a-kind) and mine (where there is no original, only reproductions, on the blog, in the book, etc). The first essay is about art in the age of photography and reproduction, and is based on Walter Benjamin‘s essay, “ The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s idea was that in an era where an image can be easily reproduced, art might be “freed up” and become available to a mass audience. Amazing how much the contents remain valid in the age of the internet.
Fantastic book based on the 1972 BBC miniseries, which someone has uploaded to Youtube, and I’ve assembled into one handy playlist for your viewing pleasure.