Daily Newsletter
Megan O’Grady reviews a new Berger biography, Deana Lawson appropriates surveillance photographs, and Paddy Johnson answers the question: Do I need an agent?
The writer and critic John Berger — that “anarchist-angel,” as essayist Megan O’Grady calls him in a review of his new biography — very much shaped the way we see. Berger himself had asked the novelist Tom Overton to wait until his death to write his biography; arriving nearly a decade after, the result is perceptive, illuminating, and an aesthetic work in its own right.
It’s good reading when paired with Channelle Chevelle Russell’s review of an exhibition of Deana Lawson’s photographs at Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. Lawson turns her camera’s gaze to beauty-supply surveillance photos of customers, which are often pinned behind the counter to deter theft. The gallery does not allow visitors to take photographs of the exhibition.
The resulting questions are deeply Bergerian, if I may: Who gets to look? Who gets looked at? Who has the power to determine what an image means?
—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
These days, we tend to take his ideas for granted: that art — making it or contemplating it — creates knowledge. That by foregrounding the processes by which we see, we can discover the mechanisms and deceptions through which we make meaning. And, of course, that it’s important to know who is footing the bill. John Berger, who died in 2017, was famous not for challenging the Western canon but for making its revelations feel so evidently connected to everything else about life. His essays often read like personal letters, offering to us the gift of our own passions and imaginations. | Megan O’Grady
Read More
A Magnetizing Force: Salvaged Metal Meets Colorful Paint Skin
American artist Kennedy Yanko’s first-ever institutional solo exhibition in Paris opens on October 15, 2026, at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine. Curated by Matthieu Poirier, Ce qui nous rassemble, which translates to “That which unites us” in English, engages Yanko’s contemporary sculptures in dialogue with a charged architectural history.
Learn more
News
San Antonio’s Centro de Artes Celebrates 10 Years with “Mercado/Material”
Curated by Mia Lopez, 16 artists transform everyday objects into bold explorations of Latinx identity. On view in San Antonio from October 16 through March 7, 2027.
Learn more
From Our Critics
More From Hyperallergic
Why Pageant Is Suddenly All the Rage
In a world skewed toward artifice, the East Williamsburg performance space’s commitment to confronting, rather than escaping, one’s conditions in art feels like a renaissance. | Phillip Pyle
Read More
A Hyperallergic Halloween
Join us on October 28 in Brooklyn, NY for an evening of spooky cocktails, devilish delights, an art-themed costume contest, and more.
Learn more
Hyper Links
—Maggie Parr on “Roy Lichtenstein Has Lost His Luster”
From the Archive
