Ways of Seeing Notes

- Assumptions about European art

- The process of seeing paintings is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.

- depends upon habit and convention.

- All traditional paintings use perspective

- Unique to European art

- The perspective creates a focal point

- Everything changed with the invention of the camera

- It was no longer so easy to think of appearances always traveling regularly to a single center

- “I free myself for today and for everfrom human immobility. I am in constant movement.”

- Manifesto written in 1923 by Dziga Vertov, Russian film director.

- The camera changed what we see and how we see

- Photography can reproduce anythiing, making is available everywhere and in different shapes

- Painting once belonged to one place, now they are available everywhere.

- A painting is also its environment

- “Sometimes, when you go into a Renaissance church or chapel, you have the feeling that the image is on the wall are records of the building’s interior life. Together, they make up the building’s memory, so much are they part of the life and individuality of the building. Everything around the image is part of its meaning. Its uniqueness is part of the uniqueness of the single place where it is.”

- Example: Icon

- The meaning of any piece has become transmittable

- Original paintings are still unique

- Reproductions distort

- The Virgin Of The Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.

- The National Gallery catalogue is for art experts.

- The entry on this painting is about 1k pages long, densely written.

- They are about who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, its likely date, the pedigree of its owners.

- Behind this information lie years of research.

- To prove beyond any shadow of doubt that it is a genuine Leonardo.

- Art would be more enjoyable without the mystery and false religiosity

- Usually linked with cash value

- The camera, by making the work of art transmittable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning.

- Music and rhythm changes the significance of picture

- I’ve said that as soon as the meaning of the painting becomes transmittable, this meaning is liable to be manipulated and transformed.

- It’s no longer a constant. It’s changed by the camera which moves, by words but around it, by music played over it.

- When paintings are reproduced they become a form of information

- The meaning of an image can be changed according to what you see beside it or what comes after it

- What it means, in theory, is that the production of works of art can be used by anybody for their own purposes

- Children, until they’re educated out of it and are forced to accept mystifications, look at images and interpret them very directly

- They connect any image to their own experience

Source: Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing.” Home · BoB, 2008, learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/00047517?bcast=30467491#.