Agree with much of what you say. The art of a period reflects the culture of the time, including the structure of society. But there used to be a time when people looking at art (and critics presenting it to the public) weren't trying to analyze this structure, or mourn its oppressive nature. They weren't trying to "deconstruct" paintings or bemoan the "male gaze".

They were trying to absorb (and convey) the beauty and the often transcendent message of the painting. Of course, starting with modernism, elite culture's obsession with society and how bad it was meant that even the artists were mostly not aiming for beauty and an uplifting vision. This is where, in my opinion, it all started to go downhill for visual art.

I feel it's worth mentioning Berger isn't just saying that it's a product of the culture though, but the material capabilities of society too. He was drawing a line between the camera in his time as a fundamental shift in the way images could be created and in the context of a capitalist society looking at how advertizing functions and carries on the tradition of oil painting in crafting the culture of society and art by people with capital. Arguably I'd say in the same way cell phones have fundamentally changed how we use images today (I.e: memes) to grapple with the world around us and the ubiquity of cell phones has changed who can produce that art (even if things like algorithms shape whose art is viewed and the people who own those platforms get to dictate what content will get ad money), but that's a different rabbit hole to go down.

Berger has a different focus specifically on critique because it's easy to look at the surface level of an individual piece without understanding who that art is made for and why that art is somehow valued above other art.

Especially as someone who didn't commission the piece to sit in my home and has no real relationship to these art pieces other than they're old, I find it helpful to understand how it was initially made and then how modern society treats it in continuing a value system that places certain art above others as more "worthy".

Frankly I'd argue he's critiquing the value system that would just off handedly say "virtual art has gone downhill" just because now it's more accessible and easy to create than ever

I think we're now moving a bit far afield from my original comment, so I'll try to get us back. I'll give an example of how Berger's Marxism leads his astray. He called the Impressionist's work "bourgeois nostalgic art", art for the elite. But the Impressionists were the exact opposite of art for the elite, they were revolutionaries against elite, academic art based on patronage. They painted for the public and the market, and their work showed (for what was the first time), ordinary people enjoying themselves in routine settings like a picnic or a restaurant.

Why does ideology force Berger to diss their work and minimize how popular and well-liked they were? Because they showed ordinary people enjoying themselves in the first mass society in the world in ordinary everyday settings. But Marxism says ordinary everyday society is oppressive and the people ground down by a brutal capitalist elite. He can't get himself to understand that Western European everyday life of the late nineteenth century was the best life ever for ordinary people anywhere in the world or anywhere in history, and the fact that they were out happily enjoying it in a civilized urban way was a new thing in the world, and depicting that was an important advance in art.

Got it, I see what you're getting at. I don't know that I'd agree that Marxism says people can't enjoy things inherently, but often Marxist analysis does focus on being critical of how power and wealth shape societal developments so I take your point that it can end up being the primary focus in a way people might find annoying if they're looking for something else.

I don't necessarily agree that in a vacuum you can really classify that as the best period ever in an objective way unless you have specific metrics, but also you don't really have to. Certainly it would've been an interesting time to be alive. I am actually intrigued in learning more about that period now I will say.

But I think the reason that Berger focuses on the critical class analysis of art is in the title. He's mainly focused on unpacking the way "fine art" gets valued and how/who those ideas of what is desirable, beautiful, etc were shaped. Then he ties that to the way the modern ruling class of his time used art to shape what is valued and desired with the tech/economic advancements at the time.

So focusing on the beauty of specific pieces wasn't really the focus of his work, as I imagine plenty of other contemporaries were already covering that.

As an artist I also don't think that it necessarily takes away from the art to acknowledge that what I make is shaped by my need to also make money and the markets they exist in affect that. I think it can be equally true that the impressionists were capturing nostalgic scenes of everyday life in a novel way that that people would want to buy, but that also was a product of people similarly working within what would sell in a market (which would be an advancement on previous conditions where people could even choose to pursue that kind of life which is revolutionary for the time).

He even acknowledges how his book is only the start of an analysis and it would be neat to see someone pick up this work not just from the perspective of the ruling class that commissioned the art but also the artists who made it and their stories. Obviously a lot of that gets lost with history though so that's probably harder to do.