Eleanor Wachtel: When you started out as as art critic... you wrote that you judged a work of art according to whether it helped man in the modern world claim their social rights.
John Berger: I remember writing that. Like many things that I wrote at that time there was a kind of defiance That comment has to be placed in a context in which all official thinking was saying that art was a completely autonomous activity, to do with sensibility and taste and so on. So I was defining defiantly my own practice as a critic. But I do think that somebody who is now unemployed, and who comes upon a work of art that speaks to her or him, can receive a certain sustenance from it, which will make that person more aware of their own dignity, and will therefore make them perhaps refuse or struggle against their fate. I think the concept of dignity and the sustenance that dignity requires can never be simply individual. Dignity is a question, above all, of how people treat you and how you treat other people. So if art is about human dignity, one can also say that it is about the relations between people, and that those relations are social.
- John Berger, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. As published in More Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel.
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