Power and Art, and John Berger's Ways of Seeing

POWER AND ART

JOHN BERGER'S WAYS OF SEEING

 “You’re never as powerful as you are when you know you are powerless” (Kane)

 John Berger’s book Ways Of Seeing opened my mind to society and what controls our happiness. In his book he speaks about love, art and society which is compiled in a way unusual to the standard layout, for example one of the essays does not use any words at all. Ways of Seeing was made into a BBC series in 1972.

                                                                                                                                          
What do the arts have to do with power?

Power to put out a message, to express and inspire, affect. The power to connect.

Appropriation and Ownership

You can’t get the message out without conforming to the message. Art only gets made if it will make money. If art is made to connect with other humans then surely it is impossible to claim ownership over such a thing. Bourgeoisie ownership - owning the images in a painting.

What does my art have to do with the way the world is right now?

Identity search, expression…

The reason I go to an art gallery is to feel closer to the painters. An artist paints something they feel, and that image is displayed for the public to look at. But what you are really looking at is not a random image; it’s the soul of the artist, the inside of his head. Art is more exciting to me if I know why the painting was made, when and where. It’s the same with plays. You are not reading a story. You’re reading into a mans outlook on life. His feelings are carefully constructed into a piece of art work that should connect with anyone who reads it - connecting with the mind of another human being.

This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a second. Then scroll down.

This painting is the last picture that Vincent Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.

“When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate” (Berger, 8)
 

 Tab A into Tab B. Two people become one. Become whole.

“By refusing to enter the conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. The issue is not between innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline” (Berger, 32).

 

“This annologue between possessing and the way of seeing is incorporated in oil painting” (Berger, 83).
 

“Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others…”(Berger, 132).

“Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live” (Berger, 143).

                                                                                                                                               


Short Experimental Art Film: