Art reflects the artist and is an expression of the artist's thoughts and beliefs. When people think of art the immediately picture a painting or a sculpture, but the question here is can a piece of writing be considered artwork. Writing also reflects the author and therefore it is definitely possible for writing to be considered artwork. From poems to novels, when an author writes something they are putting a part of themselves into their writing and it is being written with the purpose that there will be a reader that can interpret the piece. .
Berger's essay "Ways of Seeing" deals a lot with art and vision and how people view art, but he never talks about writing and I think there is a good reason behind that. The essay starts by telling how words cannot tell a scene like paintings can and I took that as Berger dismissing words as being inferior to painting in the way that they portray things. Also, Berger is an art critic and he specializes in paintings, which means he would know more about paintings and the history of paintings, then he would know of writing. .
Writing and painting are similar but are still two very different forms of artwork. Writing is using language to tell a story and help the reader to visualize the story without pictures, and painting is the pictures. To view a painting Berger says that you must know the artist and view the painting in context of when the painting was painted. To read a book there is not too much background information that is needed, where as the background information in paintings can change the whole way we look at it. If there is some background information needed to be known it is very easy for the author to work it into the text. In writing, a lot of things are told and the interpretation is not completely left up to the reader. All of the interpretation of a painting is left up to the viewer, which is a big reason why Berger wrote his essay.
