Cave Empter's Reviews > About Looking

Berger writes beautifully and simply about perception, consciousness, anthropomorphism, classism, industrialisation, and so on and so on. He covers a lot of ground while delivering a cohesive and directed view. His expertise and obsession with painted works takes over the majority of the book, and the collected essays on various Big Names in art are a brilliant mix of history, obituary, polemic, skewering, and autobiography. The essays assume an encyclopedic knowledge of each artists catalogue, though Berger can hardly be blamed for the infrequent and shoddy reproductions that sometimes grace the pages of the edition I picked up. Prepare either to swap between search engine and page every paragraph, or otherwise make a list of the works you'd like to actually see. For the most part Berger's description highlights at least what he'd like you to take from the works, if not the gestalt.

The theses of each essay are both instantly accessible and often profound, and while Berger's approach to an artist's catalogue can sometimes be aggressive (in the assumption that every work, finished and unfinished, represents a true view into the mind and philosophy of the artist), his points are just as -if not more- salient as they were at each essay's publication. Sometimes they are strong enough to change the way you see an artist, a genre, or the world in general. Sometimes they just make strong points about a post-cubist chair. No matter what, his style and keen perception make for heavyweight concise essays. The last one made me tear up a little.