I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
JOHN BERGERI can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
More John Berger Quotes
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
JOHN BERGER -
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER -
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGER -
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
JOHN BERGER -
The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
JOHN BERGER -
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.
JOHN BERGER -
(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER -
Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER -
Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER -
For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGER -
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGER