As such, the static materialism of the oil paintings hinders its own capabilities for symbolism. It needed to reflect the power of money, a power which is reflected on the act of the existence of the painting itself. The oil painting celebrated a new form of wealth that was emerging in Europe: not only the divine wealth of kings but that of dynamic capitalism. Art becomes a job just like any other, composing a sonata or drawing a painting becomes the same act as carrying bricks or controlling the traffic. Many oil paintings were simply completed just for the painter to get the commission he was entitled to, not because he might have genuinely wanted to express something with the painting. The period of the oil painting corresponds to the rise of the open art market. Everything was permeated and submerged into the inescapable ocean of commodification which gave any activity, any object, a specific exchange value which the owner of the object could get for it in the market.Īccording to Berger, in no other domain is the gap in quality between different paintings so obvious as it is in paintings, where mediocre works are presented to the observer in equal standing with masterpieces, with no explanation as to what differentiates them. It reduced everything to the equality of objects”. The Equality of Objects “Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo”, circa 1503-1506, by Leonardo Da Vinci via Wikimedia Commonsīerger asserts that “Oil paintings did to appearances what capital did to social relations. The motto of mystification is that of the ‘Human condition’, that of timeless truths about people which are the subject of the classics.

This type of ahistorical framework obstructs any alternative explanation. Specifically, Berger analyzes mystification in artistic interpretation where works of art are separated from their social context, of the connections between artist/art and are instead explained via elements of their composition, as though the value of a piece of art can be decoded by analyzing style, color, contrast, perspective and so on. For Berger, a painting or even a photo reveals a subject who was, at that moment, worth being captured by a person who has a direct relationship to the scene. This resulted in a disconnected view of history, one which is sterilized, decontextualized and robbed from its “viewing angle”. Our relationship to history has been mystified by the ruling classes to justify their role in society and how they got there.

John Berger argues that seeing is not a neutral or passive activity but an active decision.

Ways of seeing by john berger