Reading Response- JILLIAN KASIMOW

In Ways of Seeing, Berger writes that because of the mass reproduction of art, “images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” (32). When art was only available to a certain group of people years ago, its context was defined by social status and elitism. Since the invention of photography, art has become more accessible to the masses. Berger implies that because of this wide dissemination of images, art has lost the importance and distinction it once had. In today’s present society, reproduction has introduced a tension that is constantly striving to be balanced. Duplication of images has degraded art by making it available to people who misconstrue its original intentions but it has simultaneously been used to reinforce this old notion “that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling” (29). Though Berger discusses this constant disequilibrium, he doesn’t explain how it can be stabilized. How can art be made available to all people while still preserving its dignity?

Because of time and circumstance, art will never be the same as what it was at the time of its creation. This fact has to be acknowledged that even though reproduction might have introduced a new way of manipulating arts’ context, the original context of a piece was already lost before. Berger discussed that people’s perception of an art piece change based on the experiences they have gone through. He writes “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (8). Even without reproduction, the viewer is going to see a piece of art and interpret it based on their frame of reference because “we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (9). By doing this, the viewer automatically perceives art in a way that is most likely different from what the artist implied, changing the original context immediately. Perhaps value of art should not be based on whom it is available to and how it is made available but rather on how open ended it is. A celebrated facet of art is how it can be viewed and applied in so many different ways. Does art really have no value just because its context has shifted?