Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGEROil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
More John Berger Quotes
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
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[O]ften 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.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
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Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
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A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
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We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
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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.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
JOHN BERGER