A book about basic visual literacy, with 7 essays, 3 of them containing only images. It's not that he's original... he borrows a lot ideas from Walter Benjamin and Claude Levi-Strauss, but that he explains it in clear, easy language, with examples.

The chapter about oil painting was especially illuminating for me, as I had never understood how to tell a "great" oil painting from a mediocre one, having no context in which to see them. But Berger here really dissects the historical origins of the form, and what oil really allowed artists to do that they weren't able to do before.

Major turn off: the entire book is set in bold type. I have no idea why this decision was made, but the book is worth reading, despite this huge flaw.

Another smaller flaw: a book about images should definitely have been printed in color.

Sanat ve özellikle de yağlıboya resimler konusuna farklı bir bakış açısı sunuyor bu kitap. Fotoğrafın çıkması yağlıboya resimleri ve sanat eserlerini nasıl etkiledi, sanatta çıplaklık ve nü nedir? Yağlıboya resimlerden reklamcılığa uzanan dildeki benzerlikler kitaptaki birkaç başlıktır.
Kitapla ilgili ayrıntılı incelemem: https://kitapokurum.blogspot.com/2018...

= kunstwet bijbel (?)

If you think you like looking art and going to galleries - ha - then you need to take a minute to read and listen to this conversation Berger is going to have with you.

Link to the documentary (which I definitely recommend you watch to supplement the reading of the text): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4...

Will add my proper in-depth review of this later (as it really does deserve one). For now, I will just say that Berger makes us think: he makes us think about the impact of images, their history, their place in society and their role in furthering capitalist agendas. He makes us think about the image of women, the role they play in the system, the condition of modern galleries and museums, and most importantly, Berger makes us think about the modern day photograph and what it means for me as a functioning member of society - it's all very insightful and he demystifies art in a fashion which is simple to understand as far as theory goes. Very marxist in his views and vocabulary (which I know will bother some) but I enjoyed that part hah.

biraz geç kalmışım bu kitap için maalesef. ama holbein’in ambassadors’ını öğrendim, iyi oldu.

een derde van deze essays wist ik eigenlijk al omdat het allemaal gebaseerd was op Walter Benjamin (bae) en basic gender theorie. maar zo interessant, lekker socialistisch + extra punten voor visuele essays. ben oprecht van mening dat iedereen dit een keertje moet lezen, je kijkt nooit meer op dezelfde manier naar de wereld

‘All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety.’

I first read the book in 2000 as a young freshman in a class on Popular Culture and Ideology. I remember being overwhelmed by the wonderful insights of this book. Now, more than 20 years later, I can still appreciate the book, while at the same time being a bit more skeptical of its insights...and at the same time wondering if it can speak to the current moment in history.

If I had to sum up the book in a few short sentences it would be this: Paintings and pictures are always for something and someone. Often, paintings and pictures express the desires of capital and the ruling class. When the artist does get a moment of triumph over the medium and its language of power, it is often a hard fought and meager one.

Perhaps that short summary has done some lasting epistemic damage to the book and its meaning. After all, one of the lessons of critical works such as Berger's is that life, power, and imagery is never so simple. And yet, in my middle age years, I feel like I need critical and postmodern scholars to be less baroque in their insights and more modern.

The short summary, the abstract, with all its obfuscating simplicity is needed in order to give a very "modern" sense of order to the world.

At a time when conspiracy theories and epistemic anarchy is spreading, I wonder what John Berger would make of flat-earthers, climate change denialists, and other conspiracy theorist advocates. Are they the noble anti-establishment avant garde? I tried to find anything in this book that would speak to our unsettled times. I found brilliant insights but nothing that spoke to my own sense of unease specifically.

For that reason, perhaps I enjoyed the picture essays the best this time around. Those chapters where the art and pictures were left without text to speak through me and let my anxieties and thoughts have free reign.

An inspiring collection of essays about ways of seeing, or actually noticing what we see, when we look at images of reality (Like paintings or advertisements). A few of the essays are verbal; the others are visual (A collection of images. What do you see when you watch them?). With every answer these essays give, you find yourself with a few more new questions. Fascinating.

Although this book was originally published in 1972, it is relevant and fresh even now. One essay, the third one, is about the role of men and women in art. Obviously a very delicate matter nowadays. No one would claim now that ‘men act and women appear’ (Page 47) because of the changing role of gender and because of new technical developments: Aren’t we all occupied with how we appear, since we started using Facebook and Instagram? I would have loved to know what John Berger and his team would have thought about that!

A wonderful book for people who are interested in art or philosophy, let alone people who are interested in both, just like me. I’ll certainly look differently at art, advertising and social media, from now on!

All of what I picked up from this atrocity of a Book is that John Berger is a pretentious cunt. He hides behind the fact that he states he's "demystifying" art when in actuality he's giving you his opinion on the propaganda of art and how the artist doesn't exist. I must say first and foremost I am a huge believer in the auteur theory and author's/artist's purpose, so this is why I am opposed to this book. Berger is merely under the assumption that all art is just a way for the elite white male population to flaunt and reassure themselves that they are superior to the plebeians. I'm paraphrasing of course, but this book clearly undermines the intent of the artist. In this book Berger devalues the artist by saying that their creations are merely a tool for the elite to flaunt their wealth, as is expected from a contextualist. He only gives credit to the "masters" of the medium. Whom he states surpassed all the average form of art by going outside the boundaries of standard commissioned art (Such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc). Berger also has the problem of most contextualists, by which I mean he tries to find meaning or more accurately make up meaning whenever possible. One of the finest examples of this is when he described a simple livestock oil painting as, and I quote "furniture with four legs in the eyes of the viewer that emphasizes the social status of their owners." Which honestly might have some truth to it, but is more likely a showing of the owner's connection with nature or the artist's connection or attempt to bring together animals and people into the same composition. Essentially what I'm saying is that Berger's book might appeal to contextual art historians, feminists and socialists, but I feel it lacks any serious criticism or review on art as a whole. It is less of a book about how to see art and more a way to simplify art as a commodity for wealthy, sex-driven, elitist men.

This book is based on a television series which can be viewed on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-p...

This is a really remarkable series and a remarkable, although annoying, book. The book is annoying because it should have been a coffee table book with large colour photographs and large font – instead it is a Penguin paperback with a font tending towards the unreadable and grey scale reproductions of the paintings that make them almost impossible to view. This is agonising, as really all you will want to do is studying and think about these images for hours.

There is something we sort of know, even if I suspect we are completely wrong in our intuition. We have been, as humans, looking at pictures for a lot longer than we have been reading books. For the vast majority of us, literacy is a disturbingly recent invention – perhaps a hundred , maybe a hundred and fifty years for people in the first world. Churches told their Biblical stories as much in images as in words. For a long time even here the words were spoken in a language that was not understood by those listening. Learning how to read images, something so many of us assume isn’t something we need to learn, but rather is somehow immediate, takes an entire culture and also takes perhaps as long as to learn how to read. To understand how images work on us – how we are manipulated by them – that takes at least as long as it takes to learn the same things about how words work on and manipulate us.

So, on one level this book is an exploration of the history of oil painting and what such paintings ‘mean’ – mean to us now in comparison to what they meant to earlier generations of people in Western societies. Because the Western tradition of painting is quite a separate thing from any other ‘world art’ traditions.

He starts by saying that paintings are both still and silent. This is an interesting thing to say, because how we generally experience paintings today – or at least, learn about them – is through shows like Sister Wendy’s World Tour of Art or Simon Schama’s Power of Art. Don’t for a second get me wrong here – I loved both. But the art works displayed are anything but still or silent. There is a voice track and there is a panning and a zooming-in that turns these still and silent works into something approaching a cartoon. I had never considered the implications of this before. The painting stops being what it is, in fact, cannot remain what it is on the screen, it stops being an object that the artist created so as to speak for itself, and now requires someone to mediate between it and us, to either speak over it (explain it) or to orchestrate it (quite literally, with music) so that we are taught the proper way to read this painting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we ‘read’ paintings and images, particularly after reading a book called Reading Images: the grammar of visual design. It is interesting that in that book it is clear that linguistic grammar has been used as a way to structure our response to the grammar of images – quite effectively, I think – but this is almost counter-intuitive. If we have had a more immediate relationship with images than with written text, why is it that we need to use the organising principles associated with written texts so as to seek to understand images? Why doesn’t that work the other way around? I know in part this is because language has been formally codified, but this, again, raises the question of why images are so resistant to such codification. Why would it be daft to explain what a verb is by reference to Mona Lisa’s eyebrows?

The relationship between being naked (being without clothes) and being nude is presented here in what I take to be feminist art criticism. A nude is not merely someone without clothes – it is almost invariably a female and she is also on display, an object. In many ways she is not really the protagonist of the painting, even when she is the only person in the painting – the other person that is always present is the anonymous male viewer towards whom she is on display. He shows image after image of nude women, and even while being embraced, they are turned to the viewer, turned to their true lover, their fantasy lover, for not only are they the screen on which we project our lust, but also the reason for our weaknesses – they are, in the end, to be lusted over and to blame. No wonder they are invariably passive and languid. After corrupting the whole of male humanity, how could they not look exhausted?

And that is actually the point – it is only today that a painting can be seen by quite so many people. They were never intended to be seen other than by the very few. Today paintings are pretty much what Plato said of them, representations of representations – but as such they are a demonstration of just how wealthy the owner really was. Paintings put on display the wealth of their owners – and that was a large part of what had been their purpose. Here’s me, and here’s the missus, and we are standing in front of our house, this is our bedroom, these are the oranges we have shipped in from Spain, this is our cow and, despite the late summer sun setting, these are our furs.

The last program in the series looks at advertising and how it uses and distorts the language of paintings, to which it is the last dying breathe of a tradition spanning back 500 years. In oil painting we are looking at the current wealth of the owners – there is a now-ness about these paintings – this is what I look like now, this is what I own now – the fact that it is always ‘then’ in images is something everyone has become more aware of now we have cameras and something Barthes explains beautifully in his Camera Lucida. Time stops in the image, and as such all images are images of death. Life immediately marches away from them, leaving them as pure memory. So, paintings are always about the present and, as such, thus also immediately about the past – the present being just the past in waiting.

But marketing images are always about the future, never about the present. Selling something is about creating a desire and that desire is not here and now, it is sometime soon. In many ways advertising doesn’t sell products – it sells envy and desire. As he points out, the rich people in oil paintings are not glamorous – glamour is beside the point. To be glamorous the viewer needs to want to emulate the people they see in the images – but the people who own paintings see themselves – so, there is no need for glamour. To sell product you need to sell a fantasy and that fantasy needs to be just out of reach, but obtainable though an exchange not actually part of the image, an exchange of money for a good, but that exchange is the point of the image. That capitalism needs such constant exchanges and that advertising creates the desires that fuel these exchanges is the open secret of our society. That said, I’d never considered the relationship with time that this creates before – how, to be economically valid units, we need to be constantly living in a fantasy future, while also being prepared to put up with just about any boredom in our all too prosaic present. No wonder advertisement is uninterested in now, it needs to be – it needs to negate now for what is to come.

The book also draws a distinction between how we advertise to the working class (the promised transformation is based on Cinderella) and the middle class (the promised transformation is based on The Enchanted Palace) – for the working class buying this one product will be enough to transform you into the princess, for the middleclass investing in this bank will bring you all of the good things in life, which are, of necessity, an ensemble.

There is so much to think about in this tiny book and this short series of films. I watch shows like this and I think, imagine what television could have been – but, of course, it could never have been anything of the kind. This is very much the exception that proves the rule. So, to see what television could never have been allowed to be, watch this and then go back to reading books.

Kitabı çok beğendim. Oldukça öğretici bir okuma oldu benim için. Ufuk açıcı ve insanın bakış açısını değiştiren, aydınlatan bir eser olduğunu rahatlıkla söyleyebilirim. Sanat alanında tabloların, fotoğrafın işlevini açıklama şekli oldukça tatmin edici.

Çok sıkmayan, sade bir eser ancak insanı kesinlikle geliştiriyor. Kültür açısından okumak gerektiğini düşünüyorum. Oldukça kısa ve resimli bir eser. Bu eser liselerde bile okutulabilir rahatlıkla ve hatta okutulsa toplumun ilerlemesine katkı sunacağını düşünüyorum.