Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGERWhen 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.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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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.
JOHN BERGER -
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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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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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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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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Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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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.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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(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.
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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)
JOHN BERGER