In Ways of Seeing, John Berger starts off by saying that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe in” (Berger 8), meaning that all art is relative to the person and their past experiences in life. The way one person may see a painting may be completely different from the way another sees it. According to Berger the way people look at art is also affected by “a whole series of learnt assumptions about art” (Berger 11). For example, people may go into a museum expecting to see works of beauty or truth and even though they may not see it in a painting at first, they may force themselves to formulate some type of interpretation that includes these assumptions rather than making their own interpretation. When visiting the MOMA, I found myself approaching most of the paintings with a mindset full of the assumptions Berger described. I felt that they greatly influenced my interpretations too. For example, there were some paintings that I really couldn’t understand and didn’t think were all that great but then I would consider the possibility of abstract beauty being displayed in the paintings or the fact that there must be a deeper meaning behind it. Berger also emphasizes how the authenticity of a painting plays an important role in how people view it. I understood and experienced what Berger meant when he says that “their historical moment is literally before our eyes”( Berger 31). In the MOMA seeing authentic paintings such as “Starry Night” made me feel like I could essentially see and feel what the artists did when they were creating the paintings.

Moreover, Barnet highlights how anything can be art if artists and the public say it is, this is called the Institutional Theory of Art. I found that I could apply this theory when viewing some of the more abstract paintings and sculptures. Sometimes I would ask myself, “How is this is art?” but then I would remember what Barnet said. I couldn’t really see the artistic value in some sculptures but I may just have not been able to see the art piece as other people do. Barnet also introduces the Reception Theory which states that art is not a body of works but is rather an activity of perceivers making sense of images. Thus art is a collaborative effort and I was able to see that when my friends and I worked together to interpret and figure out the meaning behind some paintings we viewed at the MOMA.