Author of quotes: John Berger

The credibility of oil painting makes the viewer believe that he is very close to depicted on the foreground of the image objects (can literally touch them). If it shows the person such proximity implies a certain degree of intimacy.
However, the official portrait is intended, on the contrary, to stress the distance. That is why (and not because of lack of skill from the artist) person on the average portrait, painted in the traditional way, looked so constrained and motionless. This artificiality is rooted in the requirements of the image: the object needs to be seen both near and afar. You can draw an analogy with samples examined under a microscope. Here they are in front of us, we can study them, but you can't imagine the same way they treated us.

Our two ambassadors belonged to a class which was sure: the world just exists to equip their life in it. In its extreme form this belief realized in the relationships established between the invader-colonizer and the inhabitants of the conquered lands.

The idea of the craftsmanship behind exaggerated quality to remain unchanged throughout the history of oil painting.
In earlier traditions of art glorified the wealth. But then, wealth was a symbol of the established social and divine order.
Oil painting celebrates the richness of the new sense - dynamic, finding justification only in the highest power of money, i.e. purchasing power. Consequently, painting had to find a way to demonstrate how coveted everything that you can buy for the money. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will respond to a touch on the hand of a master.

What distinguishes oil painting from any other species of painting is its ability to render the tangibility, texture, luster, density that it represents. For oil painting real is what you can touch. Its ability to create illusions much more significant than the sculpture, although the image on the canvas is two-dimensional - in fact, an oil painting offers the viewer objects that have color, texture and temperature, occupies a place in space and (it is implied) filling the whole world.

Oil painting made with the visible world what capital did to social relations. Everything was reduced to the commensurability of things. All became subject to the exchange, because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured on the basis of its material nature. Soul - thanks to the Cartesian system - is preserved as a separate category. Oil painting had something to speak to the soul through what she sent, but not how it is portrayed. Oil painting expressed the idea of vneshnosti.

In the European tradition, the artists and the audience-owners were usually men, and those who were treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply rooted in our culture that still structures the consciousness of many women. They treat themselves as treated men. They, like men, see their own femininity.

Live sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state. If isolated from this process, a single point, then the resulting image will seem banal and its banality will make a chilling impression, rather than to serve as a bridge between two very deep and poetic States. For this reason, expressive photos of naked women are even rarer than paintings. A simple solution for a photographer is to turn the figure into a Nude model, which, summarizing, and spectacle and spectator, and depriving sexuality of specificity, turns desire into fantasy.

Stranger nudity is the evidence that causes a very strong feeling of relief. She's just a woman like any other. Or: he is a man like any other. We are struck by the marvelous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism.
<...>
We didn't expect to see them different, but the power and complexity of our senses create a feeling of uniqueness, which is scattered at the sight of another what it is. It is more similar to other people of their sex, than different from them. This offers us a warm and friendly (as opposed to cold and impersonal) the anonymity of nakedness.
To say it another way: exposure brings with it an element of banality <...>

For the average European painting of a Nude model, never seen her main character. The main character - the viewer standing before a painting, and it is assumed that he is a man. All addressed to him. It should look like the result of his presence. It is for him a figure in the painting gained its nakedness. But he is, by definition, a stranger, and all his clothes on it.

To be naked is to be oneself.
To be naked is to be seen naked from the side and at the same time not aware of their nakedness himself. Naked body to be naked, must be seen as an object. The naked body reveals itself. Nude model on display.
To be naked is to be without masks.
To be public means to transform the surface of his own skin, the hairs of his own body in a mask that is impossible to remove. Nude has the possibility of becoming a naked body. Nakedness - clothing.

<...> men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women look how they look. This in most cases determines not only the attitude of men towards women but also the relation of women to themselves. The observer inside a woman - man and seeing a woman. Thus she turns herself into an object, into an object of vision - a sight to see.

To be born a woman meant to be born in the established and enclosed space, under the guardianship of men. The nature of female presence in society was formed by the skill of the women to live under such guardianship and in such a confined space. But the woman had to pay a split personality. A woman must continually watch herself. She almost always carries an image of herself. Whether it is across the room or crying about the death of her father, she can not imagine herself walking or weeping. From early childhood she had been taught and persuaded all the time to take care of yourself.
And so she accustomed to consider the observer and the observed in himself the two essential, but always the individual components of his personality.
She needs all the time to keep track of who she is and what she does because of how its seen by others, and ultimately how her see men, is of crucial importance for what is generally considered success in women's lives. Experiencing itself, is displaced by the experience of how it is evaluated by others.

According to tradition and custom, already discussed but not yet resolved, the nature of the presence of women in society and the different nature of the presence of men. The man's presence rests on the promise of power which he embodies. If this promise is impressive and persuasive, and his presence noticeable. If it's modest or inconclusive, and place the man is appropriate. The promised power may be moral, physical, emotional, economic, social, sexy, but in any case the object napoloen to man. Men's presence suggests what he can do to you or for you. This presence could be a hoax in the sense that a man can only pretend that he is capable of something that in reality he is not capable. But in any case this claim to a power that can be applied to someone else.
On the contrary, the nature of the woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what it can or cannot be done. Her presence is expressed in her gestures, voice, opinions, statements, clothing, elected by the environment the taste; in fact, literally everything she does, affects the nature of her presence. To be so peculiar to women, that men tend to perceive her presence as a kind of, you might say, a physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

Visual art has always existed in a protected space. Originally this immunity was magical or sacred nature. But, in addition, it was just physical: it was a place - a cave, a building in which (or for which) it was written picture. The experience of art (originally the former experience of the ritual) was separated from the rest of his life just to over the life of the rule. In the future, this isolation has taken on a social character. Art has entered the culture of the ruling class and physically it has been isolated, enclosed in their palaces and homes. Throughout this history the authority of art was inseparable from the authority of the reserved space.
What did the modern means of reproduction of images, so it destroyed the authority of art and removed it (or, rather, seized the images, which are now reproduced) from any part of the reserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become fleeting, omnipresent, intangible, available, worthless, free. They surround us as well as surrounds the language. They came into the stream of life, on which more in themselves have no power.