Comment by voiceofchoice

I feel it's worth mentioning Berger isn't just saying that it's a product of the culture though, but the material capabilities of society too. He was drawing a line between the camera in his time as a fundamental shift in the way images could be created and in the context of a capitalist society looking at how advertizing functions and carries on the tradition of oil painting in crafting the culture of society and art by people with capital. Arguably I'd say in the same way cell phones have fundamentally changed how we use images today (I.e: memes) to grapple with the world around us and the ubiquity of cell phones has changed who can produce that art (even if things like algorithms shape whose art is viewed and the people who own those platforms get to dictate what content will get ad money), but that's a different rabbit hole to go down.

Berger has a different focus specifically on critique because it's easy to look at the surface level of an individual piece without understanding who that art is made for and why that art is somehow valued above other art.

Especially as someone who didn't commission the piece to sit in my home and has no real relationship to these art pieces other than they're old, I find it helpful to understand how it was initially made and then how modern society treats it in continuing a value system that places certain art above others as more "worthy".

Frankly I'd argue he's critiquing the value system that would just off handedly say "virtual art has gone downhill" just because now it's more accessible and easy to create than ever