thirty years on, 'Ways of Seeing' continues to be a major primary textbook, not just for those studying or interested in fine art, but in any of the humanities from literature to cinema. You can see the appeal for lecturers - difficult but essential theorists such as Benjamin and Barthes are explained with bite-size lucidity, even if this sometimes has the effect of caricaturing their work. As Geoff Dyer has noted, much of the impetus given to Cultural Studies, the critical/academic form of post-modernism, can be traced to Berger's TV series and this book: many of the questions raised and areas for study pinponted have generated a whole academic industry.
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appropriate, though, for a book pleading the return of history to the criticism or art, 'Ways of Seeing' is itself an historical document.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.
