John Berger, the Critic Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention

By Daniel Okafor

The British art critic John Berger built a career on a single, subversive proposition: looking is a skill, and most of us were never taught it. A new appreciation of his work argues that his writing now serves as the antidote to our age of infinite scrolling.

That claim lands harder than it might have a decade ago. Berger spent his life insisting that images do things to us — and that we might, with effort, do things back. The feed disagrees. The feed wants speed, volume, and a thumb that never stops.

Berger wanted the opposite. He wanted slowness, suspicion, and a viewer who talks back.

What makes Berger an antidote to the scroll?

Infinite scrolling rewards the glance. Berger championed the gaze — sustained attention paid to a single image until it yields something.

His method had a few consistent moves:

• Ask who made the image, and for whom.
• Ask what the image wants you to feel, and whether you should feel it.
• Ask what the image leaves out.
• Notice your own looking, not just the thing looked at.

None of this is complicated. All of it is difficult. Attention, Berger implied, is a form of respect — and respect takes time the feed doesn't bill for.

The essay framing this revival, "The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention," positions Berger's collected works as a counter-practice. Not a detox. Not a digital sabbath. A different way of using your eyes.

Does criticism still work as resistance?

Berger wrote as if images were arguments, because they are. Advertising, portraiture, oil painting, the family snapshot — each one makes a case about how the world is arranged, and each one usually wins by default.

Criticism is the appeal. Berger filed it relentlessly.

His prose model is worth naming: plain language, short books, big claims. He treated viewers as intelligent rather than credentialed, which is why his work travels so well outside the academy. You don't need a seminar to read him. You need a chair and an unhurried hour — the exact commodities the scroll consumes.

The comparison is almost too neat. The feed trains you to see everything and look at nothing. Berger trained readers to see less and look harder.

Why now?

The timing explains the revival. Attention has become the scarcest resource in culture, and everyone from app designers to museum directors is competing for what's left of it. Museums want slow looking. Platforms want fast thumbing. Berger sits firmly on the museum's side of that fight, and he offers the vocabulary for it.

Rereading him today feels less like nostalgia than triage. His works amount to a manual for the exact deficit the scroll created — a deficit measured not in information, of which we have plenty, but in attention, of which we have almost none.

That is his afterlife, and it's a useful one. Every feed assumes you'll look away eventually. Berger's writing assumes you won't — and gives you a reason to stay.