Mystification

From MarxWiki

John Berger discusses mystification in his work Ways of Seeing. When we look at artwork, we cannot see it without being affected by our own assumptions about art in general. Berger writes that these assumptions concern: beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, and taste. He believes that our “assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify.” Because we don’t see history as it was but rather as a relation to our present, we mystify the past. Thus art is of the past is mystified. Berger believes that the “the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.” Thus we perceive art differently from how it was perceived originally.