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A Smuggling Operation: John Berger's Theory of Art

Minto, Robert
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-smuggling-operation-john-bergers-theory-of-art

Publisher:  Los Angeles Review of Books
Date Written:  02/01/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Examining the theories put forth in 'Landscapes' by John Berger.

Abstract: 

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Excerpts:

Berger takes art out of the sanitizing temples where we store it and drops it firmly back onto the easel, in a messy studio, where a sweaty artist bites her lip and stores her way of looking in an object. Over and over again, he asks us to imagine the artist at work. Many have attributed this to his own training as a painter, which might have inspired his fascination with technique, as I, an amateur pianist, am fascinated by the technique of my favorite recording artists. But I think his admiring discussion of Raphael suggests a much deeper reason. If Berger believes that the most important meaning of art is what it shows us of our ability to create the world we want, it turns out that his criticism is connected to his Marxism much more fundamentally than through the borrowing of a few insights from Walter Benjamin.

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Berger's opinion of museums reveals something: our greatest art critic for the last half-century has been conducting a smuggling operation. The bulk of his work as a critic has been a plainspoken attempt to enunciate the meaning of works of art - the process of their creation - under the eyes of their guards. From his perspective, the regime of property has an interest in suppressing his work, not just because art has functioned so well as a form of wealth and an ideological tool, but because its real meaning is dangerously emancipating.
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