The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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.
More John Berger Quotes
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER -
The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
JOHN BERGER -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
JOHN BERGER -
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
JOHN BERGER -
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGER -
To be naked is to be oneself.
JOHN BERGER -
Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGER -
The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
JOHN BERGER -
Today the discredit of words is very great.
JOHN BERGER -
The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
JOHN BERGER -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER -
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGER -
What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER -
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
JOHN BERGER -
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGER -
A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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 -
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
JOHN BERGER -
Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER