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
zoos opportunity animal
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
photography flirting flow
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
sex cities age
Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.
artist drawing intimacy
There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
communication artist drawing
A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
envy emotion common
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
dogma pursuit form
Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
moving events film
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
people horizon funny-travel
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
artist political greek
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
drawing way connections
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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.
book years grows
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
two progress three
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.