What is art? No two people are going to have the same definition.  Just as one says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the same applies to art. While one person might be confused by an abstract painting, another can easily spot the meaning within. Art might take on different forms and meanings, but the key is always in the perspective of the viewer. In their respective novels, both John Berger and Alice Elizabeth Chase discuss the different ways we look at art and how we come to these different viewpoints.

In her novel Looking at Art, Chase discusses the perspective of early artists. From the very beginning, humans used art based off of sight. Some of the earliest art pieces were maps of landscapes made by the ancient Egyptians. In fact, most art in older times was primarily of landscapes. The Romans did it out of sheer appreciation for the natural beauty of the world around them, whereas the Chinese used the landscape to depict a form of reverence for their gods. Artists began to set up a sort of formula for painting landscapes. Early art became very methodical, until they realized art is so much more than what you see. It is a combination of what you see and how it makes you feel. It became, and still is, a picture of sight that holds the power to evoke emotions and sense memories, which brings the reader to a more modern view of art that Berger discusses.

Just like Chase, Berger claims sight is fundamental to our understanding of the world in his novel Ways of Seeing. We can see and feel things before we can put them into words. He claims though, that we don’t just see things as they are anymore. We look at how everything works together in a larger picture with respect to not only the objects within the picture, but also in respect to ourselves. Berger also claims that images are just are just our way of reconstructing something seen in the past. An artist’s creation is a reflection of how they see that image. When we look at an image or painting, we study every aspect about it before we draw conclusions from it. We look at when it was created, what was going on in the world at the time, who made it, etc. We change our current perspective to fit that of the artist’s. So art is not a representation of the physical world, but a more holistic representation of how we see things.

As perspectives of art shift, so do the techniques used to create it. Chase describes how early art did not account for accuracy in the details. For example, drawings of buildings or of people did not show distance changing within the scene. It was very one dimensional, until artists began to focus on the relationship between the image and the viewer. The Middle Ages brought forth the idea of a vanishing point, which the scholars of the Renaissance expanded upon through the study of architecture. It allows for the viewer to get the impression that the picture moves together towards a central focal point.

Berger focuses less on the techniques used to pull the viewer into the painting and more on how the viewer relates back to what is depicted in the image. He discusses how the detail of the background of the painting correlates to the values of the people of the time. In the Middle Ages, the more objects that surrounded the central figure, the more he or she owned. It was a sign of wealth. He also discussed how women in pictures are objects to the viewer. They pose in the way that will look best to the person looking at the photo. It is more about the signs of detail that speak to the viewer as opposed to Chase’s argument that the viewer is pulled in by the realistic shapes within the image.

There is no set way in which someone should look at art. Art is all about perspective. However the artist sees the world will affect how he or she will choose to represent it. Early artists saw the world just as it was, so that was exactly how they chose to draw it. As they developed a more complex understanding of the world and how we see it, so did their drawings. Art is an area in life that is constantly changing and will continue to grow, but how we choose to see it is a decision we must make on our own.