A.O. Scott returns to John Berger’s writing about looking: at paintings, animals, and the lives of people whose work often escapes notice. Berger treats attention as an activity shaped by memory, circumstance, and history. Art can change what a person sees because the person looking has changed.
Scott begins with Berger visiting the same Renaissance altarpiece in 1963 and 1973. During the optimistic earlier period, Berger could confront its despair. After a decade of political disappointment, he found a passage toward hope. The painting held both possibilities.
- Context gives the work depth. Berger’s Ways of Seeing connects images to property, gender, reproduction, and power. Scott also warns against criticism that substitutes exposing these connections for experiencing the artwork.
- Pleasure remains part of understanding. Curiosity, beauty, and awe matter alongside the conditions under which a painting was made and sold. A political explanation can illuminate an encounter without exhausting it.
- Attention reaches beyond the museum. Berger’s life among rural workers in France sharpened his interest in practical knowledge, animals, labor, and ways of life threatened by displacement.
- Memory makes judgment possible. Scott connects Berger’s warnings about an image-saturated present to the endless novelty of contemporary feeds. Remembering lets people place an experience within a longer history.
Scott’s Berger remains politically committed while resisting the habit of making every artwork evidence for an already settled case. A painting is something made by a person and encountered by another. That exchange can carry meanings larger than either person’s immediate circumstances.
The essay pairs well with the disagreement over Digger. There, too, recognizing a work’s political argument leaves the question of what its artistic experience actually offers.
Full text read via an archived copy from October 19, 2026, at 00:59 UTC; the original essay was published October 18.