A.O. Scott explores the enduring relevance of John Berger’s writings on attention, art, and perception. Berger, the British critic and novelist who died in 2017, treated looking as both an aesthetic and moral act — a way to confront history, hope, and evil. In his 1973 essay “Between Two Colmars,” Berger recounts visiting Matthias Grunewald’s altarpiece in Colmar, France, twice: once in 1963, when it struck him as despairing, and again in 1973, when it offered solace. The shift reflected his own journey from revolutionary optimism to disillusionment. Scott argues that Berger’s work remains vital amid today’s attention crisis, where constant images and distractions erode deep engagement. Berger warned in 1978 that photography’s ubiquity creates an “eternal present,” flattening memory and context. For him, art wasn’t escape but a tool for living historically — a way to grasp the past’s complexity and our changing relationship to it. In an age of endless scrolling, Berger’s call to look carefully feels more urgent than ever.
His essays, especially those collected in *About Looking*, insist that attention is not passive but ethical. To look is to remember, to question, to resist forgetting. Scott finds in Berger a reminder that art’s power lies not in beauty alone, but in its capacity to hold contradiction — despair and hope, past and present — without resolution. That tension, Berger believed, is where meaning lives. As modern attention fragments, his work offers a model of sustained, reflective engagement: not just seeing, but truly paying attention.
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