If he’s being canonised – if Dyer studies are becoming an area of expertise in themselves – it seems an appropriate time to think about what his place in a canon would be. If there’s a party after that, he’ll hardly be crashing. It’s only fair, then, to take the outsider ethos of his own – ‘a literary and scholarly gatecrasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise, making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on elsewhere’ – and compare it to his acquisition of the trappings of the insider: his teaching contract at Iowa, his two essay collections, the recent republication of most of his backlist, his listing in The Guardian’s 2011 ‘Britain’s top 300 intellectuals’ (under ‘Critics’), and the upcoming academic conference on his work at which he’s keynote speaker. As he walked into a British Library meeting room this May, he seemed physically and intellectually undiminished.Īt one point in the interview that followed, Dyer questioned the value of writers’ self-definitions.
In January this year, a few months short of turning fifty-six, he suffered a minor stroke and wrote it up as an essay for The London Review of Books, ‘Why Can’t I See You’. But are the reproductions still as breathtaking as the originals? Simply watching pain.Interview with Geoff Dyer ‘I’ve always believed that an artist is someone who turns everything that happens to him to his advantage’, Geoff Dyer writes in But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1991). Now instead of looking at original paintings, people just view reproductions and are satisfied that they have seen just the reproductions. What Berger is implying is that the camera has distorted art. The art comes to you, instead of you going to the art. Now you can view art in the luxury of your own home and you can sit in your living room and watch art on television. With the invention of the camera, reproductions of art are made freely and paintings “can be seen in a million different places at the same time”. The way our outlook on paintings and art changes depending on many things one of them being where and how we look and see a reproduction of a specific painting. More specifically, in the first episode, it focuses on paintings and how different one can interpret the specific painting based on many circumstances. It focuses on how we view and interpret art. Ways of Seeing by John Berger was originally a television series on BBC that later was made into a book of the same name.
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