Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGERPost-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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[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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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.
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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
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You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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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 man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
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When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
JOHN BERGER