Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series

In seven chapters, Berger assaults the traditional bastions of art 'appreciation', with its obfuscating jargon, elitist interests and, most damagingly, its insistence on timeless, non-'historical' values. three of these essays are text-free, image-based, and Berger claims all the essays can be read independently and in any order, as part of the process of 'deconstructing' the apparatus of art criticism that includes laying bare the mechanics, manipulations and limitations of his arguments, and undermining the very idea of coherent authorship by suggesting the name 'John Berger' signifies a five-piece collective.

contrary to Berger's claim, the image-essays can only be properly understood in connection with the textual ones. these are four now-classic pieces of critical iconoclasm. the first synopsises Benjamin's famous essay 'the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', and discusses how art, and the culture it embodies, has lost its old rarefied authority in a demystifying age of image overload. chapter three analyses the classic tradition of nude paintings, and the misogynistic/patriarchal worldview it upheld. A related chapter, five, shows how oil painting, far from ennobling the viewer's soul, was used to celebrate and confirm property, unequal social relations, even slavery. The final chapter discusses the legacy of this tradition in modern advertising and publicity.

Most of Berger's ideas hold up remarkably well three decades later, sturdy enough not to need the linguistic acrobatics of his successors. As is appropriate, though, for a book pleading the return of history to the criticism or art, 'Ways of Seeing' is itself an historical document. Not just in the sense of a pioneer work being a little dated in its language, a little exposed in its own ideological assumptions. unlike his followers, Berger still seems to love some art, even if his 'exceptions' seem to lack method. Some of his very personal discussions about 'love-making' strike me as being a bit embarrassing, but I'm probably repressed. His Marxist beliefs might have been expected to be the most obsolete element of the book, but the clarity and passion of his ideas are refreshing in these ideologically compromised times.

No, what I mean is, when Berger wrote this book, he was very much the rebellious outsider kicking against the cultural institutions and assumptions propping up various social inequalities. While politically little has changed, the culture industry has been made over in Berger's image. Every work of criticism on literature, cinema, art, even history is now shaped in some way by the ideas formulated here. it is ironic and sad that a book dedicated to opening minds and new ways of seeing (and thinking), should have merely replaced one monolithic worldview with another.


Art as tool   December 12, 2001
Pumpkin King
37 out of 40 found this review helpful

WAYS OF SEEING is a collection of seven essays. Three are pictorial; four are textual. All are about art, how art is seen, how it is valued, how it is used, and what we can learn from looking at art.

Of the textual essays, the first is about the mystification of art and history by its associations with assumptions and values that are not necessarily inherent in the work itself, but in its rarity, uniqueness, and commercial demand. He discusses art as being seen as an almost religious icon, and how the reproduction of images has contributed to the mystification of the original image.

The second textual essay is a study of women and how they are seen, who sees them, and how they see themselves being seen by others. It is Berger's critique of the Nude as an art form, and he argues that they place women as objects to be seen and desired and overpowered by men, the subject.

The third essay is about the tradition of oil paintings in Europe between 1500 and 1900. Berger explains the connections between the content of these paintings and the ownership of them as a symbol of affluence, as products of capitalism and the maintenance of the status quo.

The fourth essay has to do with publicity, or advertisement, and the reference that such images make to oil paintings, sexual attractiveness, and dissatisfaction with the current state of life (the promise of a better future, given that you buy something).

I'm not an art historian, and I don't know much about theories of art. But WAYS OF SEEING is a book that pierces into the comfortable notions of art as belonging to the elite and cultured, and reveals its role as used to maintain power structures. Who commissioned the work, who is meant to look at it, what is it putting on display, what are its political motives? These are questions that should be asked of any work of art, and Berger aims to ask these questions. By doing so, he also enlightens the reader.


Remains a classic popular intro to many issues in art   June 26, 2003
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
31 out of 33 found this review helpful

Barely showing its age after thirty years, John Berger's WAYS OF SEEING remains one of the best popular presentations of academic and scholarly thought in recent decades. There are actually very few original ideas in Berger's book. Just about the entire content can be found in a variety of thinkers either inspiring, belonging to, or influenced by the Frankfort school, for instance, Meyer Schapiro, Adorno, and especially Walter Benjamin. None of these thinkers are household names in the English speaking world, even though Schapiro may well be the greatest art critic America has produced, and despite Benjamin's possibly being the greatest cultural critic of the 20th century. One reason their ideas have not become more widely known is the fact that all of these thinkers were deeply influenced by Marxism, though none of them were Communists. As a result, while many of the ideas that Berger presents in his work are well known in literary and scholarly circles, they remain unknown to most casual visitors to art museums.

Berger is intent to challenge ways of looking at art and other images that ignore the status of works of art as commodities. We not only live in a capitalistic society, but one in which virtually all its inhabitants are consumers. Consumers purchase commodities. Berger wants to raise the consciousness of viewers of these paintings that they are not merely "masterpieces," but commodities. Or, in the case of oil painting, visual representations of commodities.

These central assumptions are brought out in a series of essays. The first is a straightforward presentation of the main ideas in Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a fact that Berger acknowledges at the end of the essay. (This essay can be easily obtained in Benjamin's great collection ILLUMINATIONS, which also includes classic essays on Proust, Kafka, and Baudelaire, as well as his astonishing "Theses on the Philosophy of History.") He goes on to write about such subjects as the significance of nudity (as opposed to nakedness) in painting and the ideological use to which oil painting has been put. He ends with a marvelous discussion of the real point in advertising (which inevitably arose with the shift of all European and American nations to consumer societies).

The great virtue of this book is that Berger has a positive genius for what many of the most pertinent insights of the Frankfort school has been, and a genuine knack for presenting these ideas in a readily graspable form. The book still reads marvelously after several decades. I do think the book would benefit from a second edition with a complete revamping of the photographs. While the content of the book holds up well, the photographs often smack too much of the sixties, making the book feel more like a fragment from the past than it ought. Still, WAYS OF SEEING remains one of the finest popularizations of the past few decades, though I would hasten to add that any academic would also enjoy reading it.


An excellent study of the power of visual discourse.   July 24, 1999
28 out of 30 found this review helpful

I must agree that this is an excellent book. It is not only a wonderful series of essays on art, but a landmark study of the ideological function of visual discourse. Berger "shows" how the framing of visual images shapes the viewer's perception of those images and of what they attempt to represent. Chapters two and three, on "ways of seeing women", are especially powerful illustrations of how particular attitudes are reflected in visual representations and of how those attitudes are reaffirmed for the viewer. Berger's argument is that discourse -- visual in this case -- is never purely objective, but is always reflective of a particular way of seeing the world. This is not to say that we should attempt to overcome our particular ways of seeing -- which cannot be done. It is instead a call to be aware of the ways of seeing to which we have become accustomed, and which we reproduce in our own lives.