Mystification

Mystification is the operation that makes the social relations embedded in an image invisible by directing the viewer's attention toward its beauty, its authority, or its transcendent quality. In Berger's reading of the European oil tradition, mystification was the art establishment's principal tool: the cult of the masterpiece, the sacralization of the genius, the insistence that great art exceeded the historical conditions that produced it. The function was specific — it prevented the viewer from asking who commissioned the painting, whose wealth it displayed, whose labor it concealed. The first act of criticism, in Berger's method, is the demystification. Not the destruction of the object but the recovery of its conditions. The painting remains beautiful. The beauty, seen clearly, becomes something the viewer can engage with rather than submit to.