In his essay, Berger addresses the growing commodification and availability of art, and how this changes interpretations, perspectives, and the decreasing value of images, stressing that a new way of viewing visual art must be adopted within our contemporary society. The crux of his argument centers around the statement, "seeing comes before words."
Although his assertion of the decreasing value of imagery initially sounds demoralizing, he also compares it to the transcendental and accessible properties of languages, stating, "they [artworks] surround us in the same way that a language surrounds us" which implies not only the growing importance, but the growing influx and accessibility of visual art within our society.
Essentially, it is hard to deny his argument, which seems to contain the prophesy of both a blessing and a curse: "The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language and for what purpose."
He initially begins by stating that "the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled", moving towards his exploration of a work's meaning, and how it is changed and shifted between existing contexts that the viewer may have--"we never look at just one thing, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves." This, he says, is rapidly increasing within our information-fueled society, and drastically shifting the manner in which art is viewed.
Information, he says, is wildly prevalent in society, and growing more so day by day. This is apparent everywhere: the Google mail I am currently signed into was allotted a single gigabyte of data when I first signed up for this service: I am now allowed 30 gigabytes of data, and this is for a single email account. Information, and our contemporary society, is never still, always in constant flux. He contrasts the constant fluctuating aspects of information to painting, which he states is still and static by nature.
He then introduces the relation of this particular aspect of modern society to visual art, asserting that "visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve" and "during all this history the authority of art was always separate from the authority of that preserve." The continually shifting property of information, specifically the "modern means of reproduction" has functioned to "destroy the authority of art" and to remove it from any "preserve," or separation from society. This is what leads him to ultimately state that what remains of visual art is a "language of images" that "if used differently" could lead to "a new kind of power". His urgent message is one of mobilization, pressing us to figure out how to use this "language" and for what purpose--this will lead society to a greater awareness of not nostalgic worship of the past, but a understanding of how we exist in the present.
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