Starting out as a visual artist, a profession he never fully abandoned, Berger turned to written words and mass media to transfer his polemical and at the time often controversial art history surveys. His erudite yet accessible style of writing is perhaps best known through his seminal work Ways of Seeing, a successful BBC TV series that he authored in 1972, and which was followed by an equally successful book of the same title. One of the academic superstars, his work has profoundly influenced not just academia but more generally art lovers and aficionados worldwide.
You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.Two days into 2017, John Berger passed away at the age of 90. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture a textbook about gender and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. (Btw, there is a pretty awesome moment at 4:38 of the third installment.) (No doubt, his call for skepticism certainly can be applied to Sociological Images.)īut reproduction and the multiplication of meaning also makes it easier to make connections and have personalized reactions. The art critic, for example, tells us what to think about a piece of art. He then talks about how our experience of art is mediated by media (whether it be an art book or a discussion of art in a television program), so that our reaction to it is inevitably shaped by its re-interpretation.
This, he argues, has multiplied a work of art’s possible meanings.Īs an aside, he makes an interesting argument that the obsession with authenticity - “usually linked with cash value,” he says, “but also invoked in the name of culture and civilization” - is actually “a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.” No longer something we pilgrimage to, to consume in a very specific context, they come to us. The episode is a bit slow (for my taste), but has some interesting ideas.įirst he argues that the ability to reproduce works of art in books, on posters, postcards, and television screens means that art is experienced in a decontextualized way (or in the context of, say, your living room). In the first episode of the documentary (in four parts below) he asks how the ease of reproduction made possible by the camera (both still and moving) has changed the meaning of art. Berger was is a artist, author, and art critic.
alerted us to the availability of the first episode of John Berger’s 1972 BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing.
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