Ways of Seeing<\/a>) was hailed by many people for helping to deepen their understanding of art. Berger argued that it was impossible to view a reproduction of \u2018old masters\u2019 (generally paintings by European artists before 1800) in the way they were seen at the time of their production; that the female nude was an abstraction and distortion of reality, reflecting contemporary male ideals; that an oil painting was often a means of reflecting the status of an artist\u2019s patron; and that contemporary advertising utilises the skills of artists and the latest artistic techniques merely to sell things for consumption in a capitalist market. <\/p>\nBerger\u2019s work remains controversial and has been revisited many times, particularly since his death in January 2017. Many have argued that he over-simplifies and that he incorporates the deeper perceptions of others such as Walter Benjamin, working at the interface between Marxism and cultural theory. Some have asked (for example) why there is no reference to feminist theorists in Berger\u2019s chapter on the \u2018male gaze\u2019. However Berger\u2019s work needs to be seen in context as a polemical response to the \u2018great artists\u2019 approach which characterises much establishment art history and \u2018art appreciation\u2019 typified by Kenneth Clark\u2019s (1969) Civilisation television series.<\/p>\n
What is clear is that cultural expression (art, lower case) is characteristic of all human societies and that while art and society are intimately connected, the former is not merely a passive reflection of the latter. The relationship is a dialectical one. As Marx declared in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: \u2018The object of art, like any other product, creates an artistic and beauty-enjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object\u2019. <\/p>\n
A distinction is often made between the performing arts (including music, theatre, and dance) and the visual arts (such as drawing, painting, photography, film and video). Performing arts are of their nature ephemeral, and as Robert Wyatt, the communist percussionist of the \u201860s psychedelic rock group Soft Machine, declared, \u2018different every time\u2019. The performance is the initial product, although it may be recorded, reproduced and subsequently sold.<\/p>\n
\u2018Art\u2019 (as in painting, on canvas) is sometimes presented as the highest point in the development of \u2018civilised\u2019 culture. Jean Gimpel, an historian, diamond dealer, and expert in art forgery, attacked the concept of \u2018high art\u2019 in his book The Cult of Art (subtitled Against Art and Artists). He argued that the concept of Art – especially oil paintings, on transportable framed canvas – is specifically a product of capitalism, personified in the Florentine artist Giotto \u2018the first bourgeois painter\u2019 of the Renaissance and his successors.<\/p>\n
Under the patronage of the Medici and other nouveau riche Italian patrician families, the \u2018artisan\u2019 workmanship of frescos on church walls or decorated altarpiece was superseded by the movable (and marketable) canvas. In short, it was commodified. \u2018People no longer wanted a ‘Madonna’ or a ‘Descent from the Cross’ but a Leonardo da Vinci, a Michelangelo or a Bellini.\u2019 The cult of art and the artist was born.<\/p>\n
Yet it was not until the eighteenth century that the distinction between \u2018artisan\u2019 and \u2018artist\u2019 became fixed. Even today people can be heard asking \u2013 of everything from the Lascaux cave paintings to some suburban topiary \u2014 \u2018but is it Art?\u2019 High art of course also produced its supposed antithesis – the artist in his garret (women artists were to a degree excluded from the equation), suffering, sometimes starving in the cause of art unless they are lucky enough to be \u2018discovered\u2019, often only after death. With capitalism, for the first time the artist became a \u2018free\u2019 artist, a \u2018free\u2019 personality, free to the point of absurdity, of icy loneliness. Art became an occupation that was half-romantic, half-commercial.<\/p>\n
Dire Straits\u2019 \u2018In The Gallery\u2019 is a song about the conversion of use-value (the worth the artist or her audience see in an art work or the pleasure they get from it) into exchange value. Harry is an ex-miner and a sculptor, \u2018ignored by all the trendy boys in London\u2019 until after he dies, when, suddenly, he is \u2018discovered\u2019 (too late for Harry, of course) \u2013 the vultures descend to make profit from his work.<\/p>\n
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