I read a bit of Berger’s fiction in college and found it to be fair to middling. I’d always intended to get into his criticism and when he died a little over a year ago now, in January of 2017, I decided to put it on the front burner. So, I’m getting to it a little over a year later, so, okay, I’ve got a lot of front burners. This thin book, clocking in at around 150 pages, is tied to a miniseries about art that Berger worked on. There are essays here on various subjects and the quality of them is mostly high. I really disliked the first essay, about viewing art in the age of wide-spread reproduction, but the rest of the textual essays were very good and written in a mostly unpretentious style. The essay comparing portrait/landscape/still life paintings with modern advertising was particularly interesting and Berger makes points and has insights that I’ve not encountered before. The biggest problem with the book was its size; it’s a small, almost pocket-sized book and that really doesn’t work when a book tries to have a lot of art reproduction in it. There are a couple of “visual essays” in the book that are chapters that consist entirely of pictures that allow the reader/viewer to kind of get to their own conclusions on the artworks and their connections; that’s a brilliant idea, but when the pictures are in black & white and about stamp sized, it just doesn’t come off. Still, this was a quick, enjoyable read and Berger has actual ideas and he isn’t afraid to communicate them in approachable terms. 3 stars.
tl;dr – slim book of art criticism has insightful, interesting ideas in approachable, compelling prose; book’s format is a negative, requiring the pictures to be very small and in black & white only. 3 stars.