New Left Review I/80, July-August 1973

Daniel Read

Oil Painting and its Class

The original authority of oil paintings has been destroyed, in the main by modern means of reproduction. Yet the bourgeoisie has, so far successfully, striven to mystify and rarify the values of oil paintings; not least by using new techniques of reproduction themselves. But these same technical transformations can be made the basis for a programme of appropriating bourgeois art. Nor is this a matter of taking something back—it means transferring the cultural achievements of another class and another time to the proletariat of today. That is the keynote of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, originally a television series of four programmes and now a short book: ‘The entire art of the past has now become a political issue.’ [1] John Berger (and others), Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books & bbc, 1972, 165 pp. 60p.

’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’