John Berger Quotes about Art

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All creation is in the art of seeing.

John Berger

Art, Creation, Seeing

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

John Berger

Art, Revenge, Past

John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.9, Vintage

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.

John Berger

Art, People, Theatre

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.

John Berger

Art, Italian, Space

"Past present" by John Berger, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2002.

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.

John Berger

Art, Nature, Drama

John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.736, Vintage

[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .

John Berger

Art, Revenge, Past

John Berger (2011). “Keeping a Rendezvous”, p.9, Vintage

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

John Berger

Art, Sky, People

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

John Berger

Art, Cinema, Vagrants

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street.

John Berger

Art, Doors, Engineering

John Berger Quotes about Art

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