John Berger ─ Ways of Seeing
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.
Hals was the first portraitists to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. He did in pictorial terms what Balzac did two centuries later in literature.
There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation.
What you saw depended upon where you were when.
…the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is.
In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings… becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored…
What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art…
A woman… comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
…men act and women appear.
A woman… turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.
Beauty becomes competitive. (Today The Judgement of Paris has become the Beauty Contest.)
To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.)
The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
…art prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art.
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality.
The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market.
Although [oil] painted images are two-dimensional, its potential of illusionism is far greater than that of sculpture, for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space and, by implication, filling the entire world.
Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money.
... the faculty of oil paint to create the illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a sentimental lie: namely that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered, and that the good-for-nothings deservedly had nothing.
…each time the tradition of oil painting was significantly modified, the first initiative came from landscape painting. From the seventeenth century onwards the exceptional innovators in terms of vision and therefore technique were Ruisdael, Remrbrandt (the use of light in his later work derived from his landscape studies), Constable (in his sketches), Turner and, at the end of the period, Monet and the Impressionists. Furthermore, their innovations led progressively away from the substantial and tangible towards the indeterminate and intangible.
Certain exceptional artists in exceptional circumstances broke free of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was diametrically opposed to its values; yet these artists are acclaimed as the tradition's supreme representatives: a claim which is made easier by the fact that after their death, the tradition closed around their work, incorporating minor technical innovations, and continuing as though nothing of principle had been disturbed. This is why Rembrandt or Vermeer or Poussin or Chardin or Goya or Turner had no followers but only superficial imitators.
Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.
The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. <…> Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity he is trying to sell. <…> Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observed with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion(for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.
The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.
The oil painting was addressed to those who made money out of the market. Publicity is addressed to those who constitute the market, to the spectator-buyer who is also the consumer-producer from whom profits are made twice over - as worker and then as buyer. The only places relatively free of publicity are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep.
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.
The interminable present of meaningless working hours is 'balanced' by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment. In his or her day-dreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. Ad it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.
Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing less is happening. <…> Publicity, situated in a future conditionally deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it.
All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
Hals was the first portraitists to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. He did in pictorial terms what Balzac did two centuries later in literature.
There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation.
What you saw depended upon where you were when.
…the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is.
In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings… becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored…
What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art…
A woman… comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
…men act and women appear.
A woman… turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.
Beauty becomes competitive. (Today The Judgement of Paris has become the Beauty Contest.)
To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.)
The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
…art prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art.
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality.
The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market.
Although [oil] painted images are two-dimensional, its potential of illusionism is far greater than that of sculpture, for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space and, by implication, filling the entire world.
Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money.
... the faculty of oil paint to create the illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a sentimental lie: namely that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered, and that the good-for-nothings deservedly had nothing.
…each time the tradition of oil painting was significantly modified, the first initiative came from landscape painting. From the seventeenth century onwards the exceptional innovators in terms of vision and therefore technique were Ruisdael, Remrbrandt (the use of light in his later work derived from his landscape studies), Constable (in his sketches), Turner and, at the end of the period, Monet and the Impressionists. Furthermore, their innovations led progressively away from the substantial and tangible towards the indeterminate and intangible.
Certain exceptional artists in exceptional circumstances broke free of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was diametrically opposed to its values; yet these artists are acclaimed as the tradition's supreme representatives: a claim which is made easier by the fact that after their death, the tradition closed around their work, incorporating minor technical innovations, and continuing as though nothing of principle had been disturbed. This is why Rembrandt or Vermeer or Poussin or Chardin or Goya or Turner had no followers but only superficial imitators.
Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.
The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. <…> Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity he is trying to sell. <…> Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observed with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion(for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.
The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.
The oil painting was addressed to those who made money out of the market. Publicity is addressed to those who constitute the market, to the spectator-buyer who is also the consumer-producer from whom profits are made twice over - as worker and then as buyer. The only places relatively free of publicity are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep.
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.
The interminable present of meaningless working hours is 'balanced' by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment. In his or her day-dreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. Ad it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.
Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing less is happening. <…> Publicity, situated in a future conditionally deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it.
All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.