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Essay / Analysis by John Berger - 719
He states that there are many different ways a subject perceives a work of art – depending on everything from music to location to current emotion – and that it is not the same meaning as that which the artist intended. However, an infinite amount of factors come into play in interpretation. Fortunately, humans exhibit very different reactions to things, ranging from like-minded to completely opposite reactions, but they are very rarely the same. Regardless of external disturbances, while unraveling the meaning of a work of art, different subjects will have inherently different interpretations. People may have a slightly heightened feeling about a work of art when they are in its physical presence, but the initial reaction very often remains the same. To take a personal example, I have long been disappointed by the so-called unprecedented beauty of perhaps the world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. When I was given the opportunity to visit the Louvre in Paris, I only had, as I said, a heightened sense of my original reaction to the painting. Installed in his own personal bedroom, implanted on an oversized white wall, hanging behind a bulletproof glass case was the painting I had seen 100,000 other times. I was unsatisfied, but with the room packed with many other tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of Da Vinci's masterpiece, I guess I might have been the only one. Perhaps – which brings us to Berger’s second point – all those people so eager to see the Mona Lisa had been, as he describes it, “mystified”. He believes that the average art expert has the ability to blindfold the reader and transfer their assumptions to them – which may be true if the subject has no real interest in the art itself. Everything said about something with highly interpretable qualities