Images are even more ephemeral today than they were in 1972 when Berger penned this article-their physicality is frequently no longer connected even to printed matter, but rather to the constantly-changing digital screens that mediate the contemporary American cultural experience. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us.” Today, I believe that this language of images has become even more saturated as individuals spend more and more time interacting with a visually-based digital interface on computers and Smartphones. Good article though, interesting questions. Not sure what else to say, it's not the end of the world and there is no good way to regulate this without crossing lines that as an artist myself, I don't want people crossing. I’d known Berger for more than forty years, and biographers, having amassed reams of information about a life, may render it in ways that make it unrecognizable to friends or family.
JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING GOOD LIFE PLUS
In its place there is a language of images.” “For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. Ways of Seeing by John Berger plus the evolution of technology in general. When Joshua Sperling’s biography of John Berger arrived at my door, I approached it with trepidation. If a camera was to capture a picture of a painting/sculpture then his argument is true. I believe Berger’s argument is both true and false. Even original paintings “will never re-become what they were before the age of reproduction.” Instead, we now fetishize original works with a “bogus religiosity… which is ultimately dependent upon their market value has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.”īerger (and Benjamin) posit that “the art of the past no longer exists as it once did. In the reading Ways of Seeing by John Berger, he argues the camera destroyed the idea that images are timeless or unique. Since we now inhabit a culture that takes reproducibility for granted, it is impossible not to experience all images as reproducible. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures.” He writes that “the experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life-precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it.” He points out that “original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Berger discusses the changing role of art and image as transiting from a powerful ritual experience to a powerless language of images.
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In this 1972 essay, Berger addresses ideas presented by the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in 1936. I’m reading John Berger’s last published book, Confabulations, and it’s reminding me what an impact his book, Ways of Seeing, had on me when I first read it a decade ago.(I drew this map in 2008.) Berger was a hero in my person pantheon of writers who draw: Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer.