Critical Analysis

Critical Analysis

Introduction

John Berger and Susan Sontag argue the ways and the kinds of the new technologies and new media like photography and cinema. They are not agreed in all discussion points. Like the German writer and essayist, John Berger mentioned that photography and cinema formed a new vision and a new kind of art. On the other side Susan Sontag one of America's important writers who was born in 1933 and living in New York today, explains in her book "On Photography" this new kind of art: photography's bad usage, consequences and the dark sides of it.

Critical Analysis

Berger's use of the word "history" always constitutes the relation and contrast between the present and it's past. He says that if we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past. "Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way." (Dyer, 2006, 119) Art is now a language of image. It is who uses that language and for what purpose that really makes a difference. If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power.

Our fine arts were developed; their types and uses were established in times very different from the present. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. What the modern means of reproduction have done is they destroyed the authority of art and removed it or its images far from true understanding of it. (Dyer, 2006, 119)

Art lives not on canvas, in paint or frame, but it lives in our senses, in ourself, our future and our past. Berger might has not "discovered" the past or recognized it for exactly what it is, but in his writing he gave paintings a story. For instance, let's take Hals' Regents of the Old Men's Alms House. Berger tells a story where he establishes a relationship between the Governors and the Governesses and Hals. When we look at the painting, "we accept it in so far as it corresponds to our own observation of people, gestures, faces, institutions. This is possible because we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values. And it is precisely this which gives the paintings their psychological and social urgency." (Dyer, 2007, 215)

"The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost." (Dyer, 2006, 119) if we "saw" the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. What really at stake here is how art became a political issue? It became a political issue when "a people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why the entire art of the past has ...