How Do We Look Quotes

“One of its (civilisations) most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised, with those who do not -or cannot be trusted to - share our values. Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith

“a reminder that the body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised.”
― Mary Beard, Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith

“The history of art is about how we look. It is not only about the men and women who – with their paints and pencils, their clays and chisels – created the images that fill our world, from cheap trinkets to ‘priceless masterpieces’. It is even more about the generations of humankind who have used, interpreted, argued over and given meaning to those images.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

“The modern idea that the female nude implies the existence of a predatory male gaze was not first thought up, as is often imagined, in the feminism of the 1960s. As Part One will explain, what is believed to be the very first life-sized statue of a female nude in classical Greece – a fourth-century BCE image of the goddess Aphrodite – provoked exactly the same kind of debate.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

“Nonetheless, whatever mystery surrounds them, the Olmec have left us a powerful in-your-face reminder that across the world, when people first made art they made it about themselves. From the very beginning art has been about us.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

“The more power flaunts itself in your face, the more it risks undermining its claims to be taken seriously. Ancient viewers were not all naïve consumers of any message that was thrown at them. Even if some would have looked on these statues in awe and wonderment, it is a fair guess that others would have walked by and laughed, or even spat. In the end, images of power are only as powerful as those who view them allow them to be.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

“That is why, as a basic rule, we find more images of kings and queens in all their finery in royal palaces than anywhere else; and it is why, for example, some of the most famous images of Roman emperors have been found on properties almost certainly owned by the imperial family. In Egypt too, monumental images of pharaohs commissioned by pharaohs themselves in vast numbers played their part in convincing the pharaoh of his own pharaonic power. It makes a nice twist on the usual idea of ‘propaganda’ to think that at least one target audience of these colossal images of ‘the-body-as-power’ was the person who had commissioned them.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

“Directness is exactly what gets lost in the Greek Revolution. Later sculptures may be more supple than Phrasikleia, they may be far more adventurous in their poses. But they do not engage with their viewers like she does. In fact, if you try to look them in the eye many of them coyly avoid your gaze, and many of them, like the Boxer, seem lost in their own world. It is almost as if the involved viewer has become an admiring voyeur and we are one step on the way to sculpture becoming an art object. Phrasikleia is determinedly resisting being an art object and one thing she’s not is coy.”
― Mary Beard, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization