NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING

WAYS OF SEEING BY JOHN BERGER

Sunday, October 19th, 2008 | Permalink

WAYS OF SEEING by John Berger

Fantastic book based on the 1972 BBC miniseries, which someone has uploaded to Youtube, and I’ve assembled into one handy playlist for your viewing pleasure. Amazing how much the contents remain valid in the age of the internet.

The first essay is about art in the age of photography and reproduction, and is based on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s idea was that in an era where an image can be easily reproduced, art might be “freed up” and become available to a mass audience.

I’ve recently been going back and forth with an artist friend of mine about his fine-arts-based world (where his collectors value the original, one-of-a-kind) and mine (where there is no original, only reproductions, on the blog, in the book, etc). Our ideas about making art are very similar, but our business models couldn’t be more different!

I was with him and our wives at an opening in an art gallery in town last night and couldn’t get over how uncomfortable I felt about the whole thing. There was free beer, sure, but no artist’s statement, no postcards, nothing. There was only a photocopy of the price list, along with some goofy map of the exhibit that related “culture vs. nature” or something cliched along those lines…

Why so uncomfortable?

First, the idea that anyone has $10,000 to spend on a piece of art boggles my mind. Second, I find it alienating, as someone without the $10,000 to spend on art, to not be able to “own” or “buy into” or “take home” some part of the work. Regardless of how much you love the art, there’s nothing he can sell to you, there’s nothing you can buy into, no way for you to show your support or love for the work. All you can do is snap a bootleg shot on your camera phone. You feel like a f*&%ing second-class citizen: You can look, but don’t touch. It’s worse than a museum: at least in a museum you can buy a postcard or a book in the gift shop.

Contrast this with my experience at Maker Faire earlier in the day, where the idea was: come make things with us. Everyone is encouraged to join in.

Take our friends Bleep Labs. They had:

  • Robots on sale for $125
  • T-shirts on sale for $20
  • Stickers for free

Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, indeed! Every level of merchandising was covered.

More thoughts on this to come.

ways of seeing ways of seeing

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8 Responses to “WAYS OF SEEING BY JOHN BERGER”

  1. chuck Says:
    October 19th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    i personally think that great or even good art needs no documentation. i was at the dallas museum years ago and most of the ‘modern’ art had pamphlets telling you some horse**** about the art.
    i looked at some work by Peat. was that the show?
    the earth should self destruct if someone would pay 10,000 for any of the work i saw on his site….

  2. Grant Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 6:49 am

    I think the other important point from the first essay was that reproduced art creates a phenomenon surrounding the “original” work of art. He mentions the nearly pilgrimage-like experience that people go through to see the original mona lisa. They aren’t going to have a unique experience with the art, they’re going for the experience of seeing the original.

    I feel like this ties in with what you’re saying later, but I don’t have the presence of mind this morning to try to tie the loose threads together.

  3. Austin Kleon Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 9:39 am

  4. Grant Says:
    October 20th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    Neato. . . I’ve had the book for a while, but I need to browse through those clips since I’ve never seen the mini series.

  5. Prill Boyle Says:
    October 21st, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    Very cool! Wish I’d known you when I was teaching this book at Georgetown back in the 80’s. I would have used your accompanying “illustration” and maybe even some of your other artwork. I agree with most of your thoughts about art, by the way (or at least acknowledge their validity).

  6. Mark Says:
    October 27th, 2008 at 9:31 am

    I thought Peter Schjeldahl put it well, in an aside in last week’s NYer:

    “Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience…”

    I like that word “aloofness”. Insider/outsider. Look, don’t touch. Dress codes. The Original. The Canon. etc.

  7. Austin Kleon Says:
    October 27th, 2008 at 9:43 am

    Thanks for bringing up that article, Mark! I think the whole last paragraph deserves quoting (emp mine):

    Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims—the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone—a veiled mind—isn’t playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.

  8. Amrita Says:
    November 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Just stumbled on your blog! What a treasure trove.

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