Das Sichtbare und das Verborgene. (1972)

Romancista medíocre, Berger fez bastante sucesso com esta série original da BBC, publicada a seguir em livro. Trata-se de uma contestação à marxista à crítica de arte convencional e conservadora, do tipo Gombrich, Kenneth Clark, Germain Bazin, Herbert Read etc. Desde Berger, alguns destes ¨Modos de ver¨ se tornaram parte da crítica de arte mainstream e dificilmente as associaremos ao marxismo incipiente. Porém, um outro crítico de arte de formação marxista, o brasileiro Ferreira Gullar, escreveu um tratado bem mais consequente, sua ¨Argumentação Contra a Morte da Arte¨. A premissa de Berger é que só existem obras de arte (i) porque existiram ricos compradores, patronos e patrocinadores e (ii) porque a produção e a sobrevivência artísticas tiveram tudo a ver com o capitalismo.
Acontece entretanto que Berger soa como um autor e apreciador rico expressando empatia pelos apreciadores mais pobres e excluindo uma série de fatores pertinentes ao porquê de as massas não se interessarem pela arte superior culta. Noutras palavras, & to put it mildly, por que a plebe ignara ignoraria os gostos da despótica elite esclarecida com a qual não comunga? ( )

First published in 1972, the book consists of seven pictorial and written essays concerning visual art and photography, its uses and impact on culture. It makes some bold statements.

“The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images.” I’m not sure this is true, or maybe I’ve never experienced the true authority of art.

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.” “Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.” Probably true in the past, at least in western culture, maybe even in 1972.

“Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.” “Men act and women appear. Men look at women, Women watch themselves being looked at.”

Going back to the renaissance when the wealthy began to amass collections of oil paintings, art has been “an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession” which “allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world.” And “the art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class.” Some artists may contest that last statement.

One essay addresses the use and prevalence of art in advertising, or “publicity,” which is “the process of manufacturing glamour.” Capitalism uses advertising images to impose “a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.” No argument there.

Some parts of the book hold up today, and others are, hopefully, antiquated theories. ( )

Very similar to Barthe's Image Music Text but in more accessible language. Read through it in part of an afternoon. ( )

454

This is a work of genius. Only a pretentious 1970s Marxist, aided and abetted by the BBC’s ‘Telling You What To Think’ Department, could cram this amount of fatuous tosh into 155 short pages. A single example, about one of my favourite painters Rembrandt van Rijn:

"In the later painting he has turned the tradition against itself. He has wrested its language away from it. He is an old man. All has gone except a sense of the question of existence, of existence as a question. And the painter in him—who is both more and less than the old man—has found the means to express just that, using a medium which had been traditionally developed to exclude any such question."

Ghastly. ( )