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martiancookbook 11 hours ago [-]
I very recently wrote a review of Ways of Seeing for a book-reviewing challenge. I'm a big fan of Ways of Seeing (got into it through the BBC series, free on YouTube), and I'd like to share my review here!
I recommend the book over the series. It was written after the original series aired, and gives more space to some interesting topics. For instance I don't recall the series discussing museum goers beliefs about museums.
eecc 1 days ago [-]
yep, and Sony Music Entertainment auto-ensured shareholder value was maximized
a_c 17 hours ago [-]
I bought this book on two occasions because of recommendation here. I still haven't started it yet. This time I know I have two already so I'm not getting a third one.
georgeecollins 8 hours ago [-]
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.
smokel 1 days ago [-]
Interestingly, this is not copyright infringement, or at least not for the text being reproduced here. The original book (1972) mentions "The text of this book is not copyright" [1]. The image reproductions could invite copyright trolls though, so be warned.
I found Berger's writing pretty hard to digest. But thanks for the inspiration — will try again.
yzydserd 1 days ago [-]
I came to Berger through Sontag’s On Photography. An easier companion.
discreteevent 9 hours ago [-]
I had a book of his short stories (Once in Europa). Very grounded writing.
voiceofchoice 8 hours ago [-]
Great excuse to finally read this. I also recommend 9.5 theses on art and class which is based on this.
1 days ago [-]
qoez 12 hours ago [-]
Watching the documentary based on this made me realize after years hearing about this that it's sort of incomprehensible word slop that I doubt many of the people recommending it got anything from at all https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SCoeb8QMtWWD5_7tiYB....
pacman1337 8 hours ago [-]
I agree. Just scanned it and not getting anything of this word salad. What is the main point, is it anything significant? Some of the pictures are interesting that is about it.
voiceofchoice 8 hours ago [-]
You can admit to not understanding something without having to attack it as slop.
Just because our education system does a poor job of teaching critical literacy doesn't mean other people aren't getting something out of this.
chanakya 11 hours ago [-]
Berger was a smart guy, but like so many smart people, his Marxism spoils everything. He has to see power emanating from every work of art, and traditional paintings all promoting "capitalist property relations that serve ruling-class ideologies".
Great art is above and beyond such crude bracketing. Berger is part of the trend in western art since modernism that abandons beauty and the transcendent for dull ideology.
voiceofchoice 8 hours ago [-]
If you want to understand art then understanding the economic and political relationships that commissioned it isn't really that crazy.
Just because the video games I grew up with were consumer products doesn't mean those experiences were somehow less important for my life or the people they connect me with.
Art doesn't just pop up out of thin air and the power relationships that affect our daily lives absolutely explains why the artists of a given time makes certain artistic choices.
If you'd rather preserve some kind of Romantic notion that art is somehow outside of the society that makes it then I guess that's your choice, but I'm not out here making much art for free now that I'm an adult with bills to pay just saying. Even the art I make free is with the goal of finding clients and absolutely a product of how that market is organized.
chanakya 6 hours ago [-]
Agree with much of what you say. The art of a period reflects the culture of the time, including the structure of society. But there used to be a time when people looking at art (and critics presenting it to the public) weren't trying to analyze this structure, or mourn its oppressive nature. They weren't trying to "deconstruct" paintings or bemoan the "male gaze".
They were trying to absorb (and convey) the beauty and the often transcendent message of the painting. Of course, starting with modernism, elite culture's obsession with society and how bad it was meant that even the artists were mostly not aiming for beauty and an uplifting vision. This is where, in my opinion, it all started to go downhill for visual art.
voiceofchoice 5 hours ago [-]
I feel it's worth mentioning Berger isn't just saying that it's a product of the culture though, but the material capabilities of society too. He was drawing a line between the camera in his time as a fundamental shift in the way images could be created and in the context of a capitalist society looking at how advertizing functions and carries on the tradition of oil painting in crafting the culture of society and art by people with capital. Arguably I'd say in the same way cell phones have fundamentally changed how we use images today (I.e: memes) to grapple with the world around us and the ubiquity of cell phones has changed who can produce that art (even if things like algorithms shape whose art is viewed and the people who own those platforms get to dictate what content will get ad money), but that's a different rabbit hole to go down.
Berger has a different focus specifically on critique because it's easy to look at the surface level of an individual piece without understanding who that art is made for and why that art is somehow valued above other art.
Especially as someone who didn't commission the piece to sit in my home and has no real relationship to these art pieces other than they're old, I find it helpful to understand how it was initially made and then how modern society treats it in continuing a value system that places certain art above others as more "worthy".
Frankly I'd argue he's critiquing the value system that would just off handedly say "virtual art has gone downhill" just because now it's more accessible and easy to create than ever
chanakya 4 hours ago [-]
I think we're now moving a bit far afield from my original comment, so I'll try to get us back. I'll give an example of how Berger's Marxism leads him astray. He called the Impressionist's work "bourgeois nostalgic art", art for the elite. But the Impressionists were the exact opposite of art for the elite, they were revolutionaries against elite, academic art based on patronage. They painted for the public and the market, and their work showed (for what was the first time), ordinary people enjoying themselves in routine settings like a picnic or a restaurant.
Why does ideology force Berger to diss their work and minimize how popular and well-liked they were? Because they showed ordinary people enjoying themselves in the first mass society in the world in ordinary everyday settings. But Marxism says ordinary everyday society is oppressive and the people ground down by a brutal capitalist elite. He can't get himself to understand that Western European everyday life of the late nineteenth century was the best life ever for ordinary people anywhere in the world or anywhere in history, and the fact that they were out happily enjoying it in a civilized urban way was a new thing in the world, and depicting that was an important advance in art.
voiceofchoice 3 hours ago [-]
Got it, I see what you're getting at. I don't know that I'd agree that Marxism says people can't enjoy things inherently, but often Marxist analysis does focus on being critical of how power and wealth shape societal developments so I take your point that it can end up being the primary focus in a way people might find annoying if they're looking for something else.
I don't necessarily agree that in a vacuum you can really classify that as the best period ever in an objective way unless you have specific metrics, but also you don't really have to. Certainly it would've been an interesting time to be alive. I am actually intrigued in learning more about that period now I will say.
But I think the reason that Berger focuses on the critical class analysis of art is in the title. He's mainly focused on unpacking the way "fine art" gets valued and how/who those ideas of what is desirable, beautiful, etc were shaped. Then he ties that to the way the modern ruling class of his time used art to shape what is valued and desired with the tech/economic advancements at the time.
So focusing on the beauty of specific pieces wasn't really the focus of his work, as I imagine plenty of other contemporaries were already covering that.
As an artist I also don't think that it necessarily takes away from the art to acknowledge that what I make is shaped by my need to also make money and the markets they exist in affect that. I think it can be equally true that the impressionists were capturing nostalgic scenes of everyday life in a novel way that that people would want to buy, but that also was a product of people similarly working within what would sell in a market (which would be an advancement on previous conditions where people could even choose to pursue that kind of life which is revolutionary for the time).
He even acknowledges how his book is only the start of an analysis and it would be neat to see someone pick up this work not just from the perspective of the ruling class that commissioned the art but also the artists who made it and their stories. Obviously a lot of that gets lost with history though so that's probably harder to do.
trimethylpurine 1 days ago [-]
Berger had no credentials or education in anthropology or any science whatsoever but invented a whole movement that I think doesn't carry any scientific weight. His reputation is truly undeserved.
I think the fact that his work has been largely adopted by media experts, and is taught as dogma in film/media studies course work at the college level should be a strong signal that our ideas as a society about sex and body image are severely distorted and deeply problematic. Not in light of his work but because of it.
purpleflashing 16 hours ago [-]
What does anthopology have to do with Berger's work? He was an art critic and an artist, what makes his work unfit for being used in film/media studies that overlap with film criticism as a disciplince that, when looked from a broad perspective, is just a brunch of art criticism? I think the connection is pretty straightforward.
John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.
trimethylpurine 13 hours ago [-]
Sexual preferences are a subject well within the realm of anthropology, especially if the claim is that they arise from contemporary culture, art, ritual, etc.
purpleflashing 12 hours ago [-]
Berger doesn't claim that.
trimethylpurine 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, you're right, but there is much literature that does, largely stemming from the supposition that we can divine such knowledge from a painting. And that supposition is Berger's.
purpleflashing 12 hours ago [-]
If I had to simplify Berger's thesis, I would say that there cannot be a complete objective interpretation of the image, "what it means" is context-dependent, where what's displayed, who's looking at it, what they experienced in life, and what mood they're in can change what they "see" in the image. Traditionally, image locations were relatively stable, so at least that aspect of "seeing" was controlled, but with the advance of technology, we can replicate images and embed them in different contexts with different purposes, and so art criticism and analysis should focus not only on the image in isolation but also on who and how distributes it, because that part of art (where it's displayed, by whom, to whom) carries meaning in itself. As I said, he was an art critic, so he focused on the methodology of how art can be analyzed.
I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.
Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.
trimethylpurine 8 hours ago [-]
I'm reaching way back here so correct me if I'm wrong.
Berger discussed the nude as a convention that tells you about ownership, power, and who the picture was made for.
Claude says that's chapters 3 and 5, so I'm fairly sure my memory serves.
That said, your summary is accurate. These claims aren't the primary topic of his work, so maybe I am being overly harsh on Berger.
Still, the claims have been influential. They do belong to him. And they've led to all manner of supposition about art, history, feminism, and human behavior.
throwthrowuknow 11 hours ago [-]
Tea leaves
purpleflashing 10 hours ago [-]
You can apply a scientific method for the analysis itself if you wish to. It doesn't conflict with Berger's ideas from these essays.
trimethylpurine 8 hours ago [-]
I think you've overlooked some of Berger's claims.
purpleflashing 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't. Berger himself was a Marxist and his analysis was often political (he wrote a lot but none of it made the impact as the Ways of Seeing which did become influencial in media and art criticism), but the Ways of Seeing largely talks about the methodology. He cites studies in the first essay to demonstrate how the context of a visual piece changes based on where the person sees it. His analyses didn't become mainstream and stayed confined mostly to Marxist circles (and he still didn't make claims about sexual preferences being formed by the culture), his methodology did though.
throwthrowuknow 5 hours ago [-]
Where can I buy a contextometer?
trimethylpurine 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
saagarjha 20 hours ago [-]
His work is most definitely not taught as dogma. I assure you, there are plenty of courses that will be happy to explain to you about the old masters.
trimethylpurine 13 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I'm happy to know that at least in some places it's being challenged.
saagarjha 5 hours ago [-]
It’s less that it’s being challenged and more that it’s never brought up
trimethylpurine 4 hours ago [-]
What's your major?
I minored in film/media around the mid 2000's and this was discussed in nearly every course.
saagarjha 4 hours ago [-]
Computer Science. I guess this kind of makes sense? His ideas are still a fairly new school of thought, so low-level GE classes probably won't really cover it, but more advanced ones will want to explore new perspectives for doing analysis
wonnage 23 hours ago [-]
I’m confused, so now that he is considered influential in the fields he lacked credentials for how is that in any way a negative
Unless you think those fields were scientifically rigorous until they decided to adopt his ideas?
Maybe you just disagree with the existence of “male gaze”
trimethylpurine 13 hours ago [-]
He's most certainly not considered influential in any scientific fields. You've misunderstood my comment.
I think maybe the feminist movements adopted his beliefs and repeated them infinitely to the extent that they've become as facts without any scientific basis. Regardless, I hear people regurgitating Berger-like beliefs in art museums around the world.
Male gaze, sure. (That's not Berger's btw. It's Mulvey using Berger beliefs. Great example.)
The idea that we can draw much knowledge about the owner of the painting of a fat woman, simply from the painting, is just not based in any science.
Hopefully that's more clear.
tclancy 1 days ago [-]
Can you expand on that and point me at resources in this topic? Interesting.
trimethylpurine 12 hours ago [-]
Berger claims we can know a lot about ownership and power based on paintings. That's not very well grounded in science.
Authors like Mulvey have taken this as fact and used it to make claims about sexuality.
And society generally believes this stuff, at present. That's my experience, anyway.
You could look to Laura Mulvey, Lynda Nead, Naomi Wolf, etc.
pmoriarty 1 days ago [-]
> It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world
Do blind people not have a place in the surrounding world?
purpleflashing 16 hours ago [-]
He elaborates on that but you can replace "seeing" with "perceiving" -- it would be a little easier to understand what Berger means, imo.
yzydserd 1 days ago [-]
Berger’s way of ‘seeing’ is to situate yourself in the time and place, less ocular than you may assume. And then he wrote the touching Cataracts, about how he lost his vision and gained a new way to see. He regained his vision and soon died. Possibly this is why you’ve been downvoted.
trimethylpurine 1 days ago [-]
If that's true then the down votes themselves are beautifully and ironically tone def in regards to Berger's advocacy of awareness of context and medium in which the viewer is interpreting the content.
NamlchakKhandro 23 hours ago [-]
So you're just here to tone police
trimethylpurine 19 hours ago [-]
I think Berger is. I also think it's wrong and ridiculous.
https://cannonballread.com/2026/10/ways-of-seeing-carmen-ghi...
[1] https://pengpedia.org/edition/ways-of-seeing-john-berger-471...
Just because our education system does a poor job of teaching critical literacy doesn't mean other people aren't getting something out of this.
Great art is above and beyond such crude bracketing. Berger is part of the trend in western art since modernism that abandons beauty and the transcendent for dull ideology.
Just because the video games I grew up with were consumer products doesn't mean those experiences were somehow less important for my life or the people they connect me with.
Art doesn't just pop up out of thin air and the power relationships that affect our daily lives absolutely explains why the artists of a given time makes certain artistic choices.
If you'd rather preserve some kind of Romantic notion that art is somehow outside of the society that makes it then I guess that's your choice, but I'm not out here making much art for free now that I'm an adult with bills to pay just saying. Even the art I make free is with the goal of finding clients and absolutely a product of how that market is organized.
They were trying to absorb (and convey) the beauty and the often transcendent message of the painting. Of course, starting with modernism, elite culture's obsession with society and how bad it was meant that even the artists were mostly not aiming for beauty and an uplifting vision. This is where, in my opinion, it all started to go downhill for visual art.
Berger has a different focus specifically on critique because it's easy to look at the surface level of an individual piece without understanding who that art is made for and why that art is somehow valued above other art.
Especially as someone who didn't commission the piece to sit in my home and has no real relationship to these art pieces other than they're old, I find it helpful to understand how it was initially made and then how modern society treats it in continuing a value system that places certain art above others as more "worthy".
Frankly I'd argue he's critiquing the value system that would just off handedly say "virtual art has gone downhill" just because now it's more accessible and easy to create than ever
Why does ideology force Berger to diss their work and minimize how popular and well-liked they were? Because they showed ordinary people enjoying themselves in the first mass society in the world in ordinary everyday settings. But Marxism says ordinary everyday society is oppressive and the people ground down by a brutal capitalist elite. He can't get himself to understand that Western European everyday life of the late nineteenth century was the best life ever for ordinary people anywhere in the world or anywhere in history, and the fact that they were out happily enjoying it in a civilized urban way was a new thing in the world, and depicting that was an important advance in art.
I don't necessarily agree that in a vacuum you can really classify that as the best period ever in an objective way unless you have specific metrics, but also you don't really have to. Certainly it would've been an interesting time to be alive. I am actually intrigued in learning more about that period now I will say.
But I think the reason that Berger focuses on the critical class analysis of art is in the title. He's mainly focused on unpacking the way "fine art" gets valued and how/who those ideas of what is desirable, beautiful, etc were shaped. Then he ties that to the way the modern ruling class of his time used art to shape what is valued and desired with the tech/economic advancements at the time.
So focusing on the beauty of specific pieces wasn't really the focus of his work, as I imagine plenty of other contemporaries were already covering that.
As an artist I also don't think that it necessarily takes away from the art to acknowledge that what I make is shaped by my need to also make money and the markets they exist in affect that. I think it can be equally true that the impressionists were capturing nostalgic scenes of everyday life in a novel way that that people would want to buy, but that also was a product of people similarly working within what would sell in a market (which would be an advancement on previous conditions where people could even choose to pursue that kind of life which is revolutionary for the time).
He even acknowledges how his book is only the start of an analysis and it would be neat to see someone pick up this work not just from the perspective of the ruling class that commissioned the art but also the artists who made it and their stories. Obviously a lot of that gets lost with history though so that's probably harder to do.
I think the fact that his work has been largely adopted by media experts, and is taught as dogma in film/media studies course work at the college level should be a strong signal that our ideas as a society about sex and body image are severely distorted and deeply problematic. Not in light of his work but because of it.
John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.
I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.
Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.
Berger discussed the nude as a convention that tells you about ownership, power, and who the picture was made for.
Claude says that's chapters 3 and 5, so I'm fairly sure my memory serves.
That said, your summary is accurate. These claims aren't the primary topic of his work, so maybe I am being overly harsh on Berger.
Still, the claims have been influential. They do belong to him. And they've led to all manner of supposition about art, history, feminism, and human behavior.
I minored in film/media around the mid 2000's and this was discussed in nearly every course.
Unless you think those fields were scientifically rigorous until they decided to adopt his ideas?
Maybe you just disagree with the existence of “male gaze”
I think maybe the feminist movements adopted his beliefs and repeated them infinitely to the extent that they've become as facts without any scientific basis. Regardless, I hear people regurgitating Berger-like beliefs in art museums around the world.
Male gaze, sure. (That's not Berger's btw. It's Mulvey using Berger beliefs. Great example.)
The idea that we can draw much knowledge about the owner of the painting of a fat woman, simply from the painting, is just not based in any science.
Hopefully that's more clear.
Authors like Mulvey have taken this as fact and used it to make claims about sexuality.
And society generally believes this stuff, at present. That's my experience, anyway.
You could look to Laura Mulvey, Lynda Nead, Naomi Wolf, etc.
Do blind people not have a place in the surrounding world?