BlogPost #9.1
“…as though pictures were words, rather than holy relics”. I love this sentence by John Berger. Treating pictures as a language, contorted to context and subjection rather than mysterious and hard to fathom icons. He states how paintings lost uniqueness with photography, and had to replace it with mysticism and false value. Emphasis is no longer on the emotion or declaration but on originality. This is most clear with the children’s analysis of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus.
But there is a paradox here. We reject the art expert’s take due to generalization and added mysticism and conclude that art is akin to words. But we cannot fully accept pictures and art in general as a language. Art is vague, subjective and hence innately mystified. The innate mysticism helps different perspectives connect with it, because they can be subjective. The added mysticism that we rejected from “art experts”, I believe, is an effect of the innate mysticism; when a painting can have so many meanings, it allows taking a specific one to the extreme and generalizing it. A solo un-mystified analysis is only possible if we could fathom the uncertainty in our views, but we can’t. Therefore, we can only remove uncertainty with discussions with multiple perspectives. However, we don’t need discussion to un-mystify what “tree” means in the English language.
















