[artinfo] John Berger

[János Sugár]

http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/john-berger-rip-and-susan-sontag-take-us-inside-the-art-of-storytelling-1983.html

the LA Review of Books published today a long article on his theory of art.

>  That theory evolved considerably between the 1950s and the 2010s.
>  Yet two threads hold it together with the tenacity of spider silk: a
>  critique of the political economy of art and a sophisticated account
>  of its human value, each rooted in a committed but elastic Marxism.
>
>  A Marxist art criticism of any real subtlety has to be elastic,
>  because it must deal with a problem Marx himself diagnosed but
>  failed to solve. Berger puts it like this:
>
>  A question which Marx posed but could not answer: If art in the last
>  analysis is a superstructure of an economic base, why does its power
>  to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why,
>  asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began
>  to answer the question [Š] and then broke off the manuscript and
>  was far too occupied ever to return to the question.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-smuggling-operation-john-bergers-theory-of-art/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utEoRdSL1jo