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 BERGERPropaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
More John Berger Quotes
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER -
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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 -
No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGER -
For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
JOHN BERGER -
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGER -
There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
JOHN BERGER -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGER -
The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
JOHN BERGER -
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
JOHN BERGER