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About Looking

About Looking

by John Berger, afterword by Tom Overton

$18.95
$18.95
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As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger was a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking, Berger explored our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see.

How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti?

Part of an ongoing reissue of Berger’s major works of criticism and fiction, About Looking quietly—but fundamentally—alters the vision of all who read it.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230670
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

There is great stillness in Berger’s prose. But after a few pages, his statements start to sing and go on singing.
—New Republic

Instant readability … [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language.
—New Statesmen

Berger values art—whether records of moments or momentous breaks in tradition—as ‘Moments Lived’ … The stress is on the ‘lived’: ‘the importance of the subjective experience as a historical factor.’ In a sense, these moments are illuminations that allow us ‘to see more clearly.’
—Hal Foster, Artforum

Britain's John Berger has got to be the widest-ranging Marxist art critic around; and in these 23 assorted essays, 1966-79, he almost apotheosizes into a butterfly. He'll poke around at anything anywhere that might ratify his rather wistful dream of truly socio-historical art.
—Kirkus

How readily we, as a civilization and as individuals, stop believing in the value of that awe-inspiring variety of sentient life. Hardly anyone has addressed this disquieting cultural tendency with more dimension than John Berger … In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?,' part of the altogether fantastic 1980 anthology About Looking … Berger examines the evolution of our relationship with animals and how they went from muses for the very first human art … to spiritual deities to captive entertainment.
—Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Berger resisted and arguably even vanquished the academic condescension toward artists and the public. Instead, he felt indebted: to the former’s intentions, to the latter’s ability to relate to art through lived experience.
—Sarah Cowan, The Paris Review

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