Ways of Seeing
by John Berger
Book Read on 1 / 7 / 2006
I just looked at my clock and it was 23:32:23.
This book was good, if and this seems to be a pattern lately, a little bit dated. There are some very interesting points. This is a really bad paraphrase.
Art is a business, it started off as commissions created by rich merchant classes to show how rich and powerful they were. In modern times, their work is regarded and highly valued for completely vacuous reasons. The images are rare, but the irony is that they aren't thanks to mass production. Art objects are still used to show of how rich and powerful you are. Since I can print a million copies of the Mona Lisa, you have the "original" is pretty silly.
Lemme see what else, I wrote a bunch of notes in one of my many notebooks, but of course can't be bothered to look for/at it right now.
We are bombarded with images now of people selling lives that COULD be so much better if we bought their products. The oil paintings of the Renaissance were used to show how rich and powerful the people already WERE.
So we've taken art, and the way we look at images from the beginnings of scratching on caves, to a way to show us we need to buy some crap to make ourselves feel better, even though that doesn't work.
I'll try to write more on this book later.
I'm tired.
Oh, but one other thing, we see before we can spean and name/classify things. But when we give them a name, we frame the image, basically destroying it.
Reviewer: William Koplitz
4 out of 5