- #John berger ways of seeing mystification professional
- #John berger ways of seeing mystification free
The success of Gandhi and his peaceful methods became an example which later inspired and educated leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience”, inspired Mahatma Gandhi. The past can be a powerful learning tool, offering proven examples for positive solutions. For this reason, as Berger illustrates statistically, the less educated lower classes have little or no interest in “art appreciation.” These heavily guarded “holy relics” are viewed as priceless objects, owned and maintained by the wealthy.Ĭonsequently, these objects are not viewed as direct historical links offering crucial perspective for an individual to understand their present existence.īerger illustrates convincingly that this historical ignorance negatively impacts the choices and actions one makes in the present. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.The ruling classes have always maintained the financial power to control works of art physically, and consequently their meaning. 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 mystification 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.
#John berger ways of seeing mystification 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.