About Looking

Abstract

Abstract To understand the need for leftist art critics like John Berger, as well as the reason he is unusual, it is important to recognize the way art criticism embodies and is disembodied by the contradictions of modern society. At present, art criticism has regressed to a species of empiricism which hardly does more than give tautologic descriptions of art forms, just as avant-garde art has become appropriated by a system that now needs art to remain anarchistically apart. Since it is assumed that description can be neutral, a basic presupposition is always that, in carefully describing the art object, the critic has somehow "objectively" explained it — a presupposition which results in self-serving pronouncements about "taste" and "quality" that ironically bear witness to the social pretensions of those who make them.

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