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The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
John Berger
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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Style
Idols
Media
Network
Winning
Principal
Pity
Aura
Leaves
Auras
Neither
Generates
Darkness
Recognizes
Rest
Idol
More quotes by John Berger
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
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
John Berger
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
John Berger
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
John Berger
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
John Berger
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
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
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
John Berger
The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
John Berger
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
John Berger
What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
John Berger
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
John Berger
[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
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
John Berger
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
John Berger
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger