In 1972, art critic and writer John Berger published his landmark piece of contemporary art criticism, Ways of Seeing. Based on his BBC television series of the same name, the book argued that “seeing comes before words,” and that our interpretations of art are influenced chiefly by our own personal and political backgrounds. For many, Berger’s writing fundamentally altered not only the way they viewed art, but created it too.
Berger’s holistic considerations of context may be a clear-cut catalyst for creativity, but a book need not have art in it to make its mark on the people who make it. Multidisciplinary artist Ivan Cheng’s reverence for Bhanu Kapil’s body-political prose was littered throughout the former’s avant-garde performance at this year’s AIR Festival. Meanwhile, a liminal version of the childhood classic Eloise is easily identifiable in Taína Cruz’s paintings for the Whitney Biennial.
To get a read on what novels, essays, biographies, and more help shape the contemporary art world today, CULTURED asked 10 artists to see what tomes on their shelves have had the biggest impact.
“I love books, and many have profoundly shaped me, so this is a difficult question. But if I had to choose one, I’d say Moby-Dick.” — Enrique Martínez Celaya
“Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil. Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years. Paper Exhibition by Raimundas Malašauskas. Cookie! by Jan Verwoert.” — Ivan Cheng
“David Armstrong: The Silver Cord. I saw it right when I started taking photographs in the late ’90s. It made me think about community and capturing portraits of close friends in tender moments.” — Ryan McGinley
“Recently, I’ve been reading Carl Jung and James Hollis, thinking about shadow work. But Ways of Seeing by John Berger was foundational—it changed how I see images and their meaning.” — Danielle Mckinney
“Eloise by Kay Thompson.” — Taína Cruz
“Toni Morrison’s essay ‘The Site of Memory‘ is really important to me as she’s writing about writing. Her ideas around history and memory and truth map really well onto my practice as an artist. If I could add a second book, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time is a really cool primer for learning about quantum physics and how my perception of time is relevant to my work.” — Kenturah Davis
“Photography Against the Grain by Allan Sekula.” —Lyle Ashton Harris
“Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth is a powerful memoir of making art and music amid Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship. The concept that stuck with me is antropofagia, translated as ‘cultural cannibalism,’ which describes a subversive strategy of ingesting and transforming dominant cultural forms.” — Cayetano Ferrer
“There are three: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis, Pictures and Tears by James Elkins, and Hymns to the Night by Novalis.” — Friedrich Kunath
“Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I read this way back in the ’80s at college. It changed the way I looked at art—it was my first inkling of feminist art. It also made me more aware of how art is viewed as an image and how people may know a piece of work more by a reproduction than from ever viewing the real object. It started me thinking about how art is collected.” — Hew Locke
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