Ways of Seeing

There are a set of commercials that I have seen recently that feature young artists. One is of a young man who is making copies of classical paintings and adding his own personal twist. He is taking paintings by artists like James McNeill Whistler and Norman Rockwell and putting them into a context that he can care about. Basically he is taking classical paintings like the famous portrait of Whistlers mother (an old lady in a rocking chair, at the Louvre in Paris France) and changing the subjects ethnicity to something other than white. His reasoning's being that its hard for people to care about art that they cant relate to, and if all of the subjects are white and your not its hard to relate to. This relates to what John Berger is saying in "Ways of Seeing" in so many ways.

First the "cultural mystification" of the past. All of the paintings that this young man is repainting represent the white monopoly on contemporary and classical art. All of the paintings are so well known that even if you cant remember the name of the painting you could still recognise it. By repainting them with subjects that he can recognise and relate to he is creating a new interpretation of the paintings. He is also contributing to the appeal of the paintings by widening the range of its audience. This in turns challenges the notion of art being for a privileged minority.

So how did this young man achieve this, did he spend countless hours in museum observing the works of the masters, probably not. The increasing availability of prints is what helped him to create his own unique versions of well known works of art. But is also the way that a lot of us are exposed to classical art now, be the reproduction form a text book a warped add in a magazine.

The meat of Berger's argument in Ways of Seeing is that art is not what it used to be. The way that we see things has changed significantly in the last century. Part of this change involves photography and the ability to replicate great works of art, and provide it to the general masses who would have not normally been exposed to such things. The meaning of these works of art are changing in two ways, first the meaning that they convey to the audience is changing. Partially because our own way of thinking about things has changed so much in the past century and because of the wider audience that now have access to such work. Then there is the monetary value of the paintings that is changing. The appeal of the actual physical work is not longer the value, its the pedigree of the work that is becoming important. Berger warns us to not let art be a thing of the privileged few, that art is a thing for all classes of people.