John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
heart names links
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
today hijacking discredit
Today the discredit of words is very great.
power illusion greater
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
song order essence
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic. We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message. The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
nature art drama
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. 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.
dogma pursuit form
Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
hands stories
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
moving events film
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
artist political greek
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
book years grows
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
death time character
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
past dying grows
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
envy reassurance illusion
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. 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. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
god photography memories
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.