Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art)

Wins the award for worst book design of the year. The text is almost unreadable as it is microscopically small, condensed, boldface and sans-serif, all of these opposite to what is needed for readability. The lines are unreadably wide and the margins are absurdly small, the gutter being so minimal that one must virtually break the spine to read the nearby text. The many illustrations are so muddily printed that one can not make sense of the book's discussion of them. E.g., the text refers to painting details that can not be made out by the reader.

The writing itself is a mix of insights and clotted unreadable academic bilge. The paragraphs are excessively long, the authors being unacqainted with the concept of paragraph breaks. (The book consists of seven unrelated "essays," some containing only images and no words.) And by the way, don't expect a Table of Contents or an Index to help make the book useful; there are none.

Probably a competent editor and book designer could have made something of this dog's breakfast. However, no one tried to fix the problems. My one star rating is generous.

Berger isn't making artistic observations as much as social commentary. He gives not-so-subtle hints that he's basically a communist and talks about how European Art serves the purposes of the elite (from feudalism to capitalism) to oppress "the majority." There is even an entire chapter talking about art oppressing women.
That said, I see three ways people would refer to this book:
#1 - People who hold a similar (or the same) position, these would point to this book as an authoritative statement to prove their position
#2 - People who hold the opposite position, these people would just pass it off and meaningless propaganda
And finally, the way I came at it:
#3 - As a academic work
And it is the failure to survive as an academic work that requires me to rate this book poorly. First I must say, I was interested in hearing how Berger would argue his position, so please don't simply accuse me of disregarding the book because I don't agree with the thesis.
Basically, Berger takes some observations from Art History, formulates his thesis, and then fails to give ANY argumentation for his thesis. That is what I find unforgivable. No doubt people will point to certain passages as his 'argument.' But any such passages are nothing but references back to the works that helped Berger formulate his thesis. At best one could call this further explanation of his theory, at worst you can accuse him of circular reasoning. Because of this, I was tempted to throw the book across the room many a time while reading it.
Finally, I'm forced to label this book as pseudo-academic and give it the lowest recommendation possible.

Yesterday I was in downtown Chicago to visit a water treatment center. On my way there I passed a playground and nearly stepped on a used condom. It looked like molted skin from a snake. I could picture some guy the night before chucking it out the window of his car. Three children whose arms were full of books ran past me chattering about the Cubs and the White Sox. It was so strange to see the condom and then the children and unexpectedly I thought of John Berger where he writes about advertisements in magazines laid out next to news articles depicting horrible events, and I had this feeling of despair, but I arrived at the water treatment center not long after that and found a seat close to the front. A woman from Berkeley was giving a talk on ways to sanitize waste water and reintroduce it to the main water supply. While we waited for her to begin, I thought about the people next to me, wondering which one of us was an advertisement for a better life and which one of us was a horrible event.

My copy of this seminal book, originally published in 1972, is a 1983 reprint. I looked at it around that time and was turned off by it. It seemed overly tendentious; plus, it was downright ugly. I doubt that I read beyond the first essay (of seven, three of which consist entirely of pictures). Well, on reading it more carefully and from cover to cover three decades later, I now view it as a worthwhile -- important, even -- work of cultural criticism.

Rather than describe WAYS OF SEEING myself, I refer any reader of this review to the the store review by darragh o'donoghue, dated October 22, 2001, which currently is one of the highlighted reviews on the store's product page for the book. O'Donoghue's review is superb, one of the best I have encountered on the store. In it, he summarizes WAYS OF SEEING better than I could, and he places Berger and the book in their cultural context, thirty years later.

But I will go on and mention three criticisms, the cumulative effect of which is to drop my the store assessment of the book from five stars to four. First, the rather arrogant, preachy tone annoys me. Second, Berger sometimes pushes a point much too far (in other words, he gets carried away in his tendentiousness), such as when, in the essay on the sexist objectification of women that has prevailed in traditional Western oil painting, he shows a picture of two satyrs and about two dozen nude women and writes: "Men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this [in the nineteenth century]. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man." Silly. Last, the book still strikes me as ugly -- from the abysmal quality of the black-and-white reproductions, to the typeface, to the formatting and design.

This is a stunning book. I never thought of seeing, and looking at photographs and paintings in a holistic sense until I read the book.
The four essays in print, and three pictorial ones make it easy to read, and follow.

The last essay on publicity is an absolute classic. This is a book that gives so much in so little space.

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.

"Seeing comes before words" says the front cover of the book before you get to any images. What an interesting contradiction. The images in the book are, in themselves, nothing of particular interest. It's the words that hold the attention.

And the words are there to attack art history and the way art has been used as a tool of the exploitative class. Berger is a Marxist, although he doesn't lean heavily on other people's theory in his own accounts.

Basically, this is about how images make a world. Images impose a world view on their viewers. Berger wants to point out how this world view is about powerful (white) men. (Race is not a major focus of the work, but it is taken for granted.)

Once Berger shows that images make a world, he argues that technology makes the original more, rather than less, powerful. He cites Walter Benjamin. I believe that this is quite true, and digital technology has not changed it. The original somehow gains more power from being unique. Seeing Hopper's "Nighthawks" every day on my screensaver and in the flesh at the Whitney for a recent show are two extremely different experiences. But this power is not necessarily for the good.

He then turns to an incisive discussion of how women are always aware of being seen and how oil paintings present women as objects, not subjects. I still find this to be quite relevant.

Next, he focuses on oil paintings as the means by which the ruling class made permanent their claim to ownership of land and to their right to rule. Finally, he argues that advertising ("publicity") has taken the traditions of oil paintings but applied them, not to the ruling class, but to the middle class. While traditional oil paintings celebrated what is, advertising promises what will be. It never celebrates what is.

Thus, the middle class is doomed to always chase the leftovers of the rich, he argues. While the ads themselves are quite dated, the mechanism of deferred desire (buy this product and you will then have it) remains the same.

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.

This is an interesting little book. It is based on a BBC television series of the same name, which I have never seen. I read this book for a writing class while I was a freshman in college in 1985. I remembered liking it (but couldn't remember why), so I picked up a copy at a used bookstore this year and reread it a few times. Now I remember why I liked it. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger chronicles how oligarchical social structures have been perpetuated in western society via the Western European painting tradition (mostly Renaissance oil paintings of the 1500s-1600s). He briefly tries to deconstruct oligarchical myths (perpetuated via painting) such as "true art can only be appreciated by the elite few" and "women's selfhood/bodies must always be constructed to please the patriarchal version of men's gaze." In addition, he attempts to show that European oil painting was often a vacuous object used by the European elite to reinforce their views of superiority over the poor, nature, and material items. He also shows how many of the oligarchial images in Western European painting are now used by capitalism/consumerism to perpetuate this "power for the few" structure through the creation of mass envy via advertising. Although this book was published in 1972 and the images are definitely dated, I think it is very forward-thinking philosophically and certainly very relavant to my own perspective on our current "global domination capitalism." I definitely agree with Berger's assessment in the last essay that the imagery of publicity is built upon convincing consumers that capitalism equals freedom, but in the end this imagery often reinforces the oligarchical structure it's supposed to be against. This is the tragedy of, in Rianne Eisler's words, "domination paradigms." A few criticisms: I find Berger's writing style paradoxically both clear and abstruse. I say this because I have read the book several times (most recently just before writing this review), but I often have a hard time remebering its content after I read it. And, at 150 pages, it is by no means a comprehensive analysis of oligarchical structures in European painting. However, overall, I find Ways of Seeing an interesting read and definitely worth going back to again and again.

This little book is about the dialetics of seeing. In a highly distilled and sweeping fashion, this book touches on the many issues that one should know about when it comes to looking at works of art:
(1) The relationship between what we see and what we know
(2) The ideas of establishing relationships between things and ourselves
(3) The notion of seeing and be seen
(4) Assumptions and Mystification - the idea that our (and some art historian's) interpretations could sometimes mislead us and the need to objectify.
(5) Reproduction of what we see in paintings and photographs
(6) Our fetish with "nudes" in artistic work
(7) Objects and our possession of objects
(8) Social images like advertising and their allusions as well as their effects on our psyche
This book is deceivingly short and easy to read. However, every paragraph could probably serve as a major synopsis for any lengthy research paper! Enjoy!

I will begin this review by mentioning that I have not seen the television mini-series that WAYS OF SEEING is based on. However, that did not appear to detract from the text in any way, as this was both a very interesting and a highly informative read. The book covers a lot of territory from the mind to sex to capitalism. It's unfortunate that the book is as short as it is, as not every section gets the detailed attention that it deserves. This book would have greatly benefited from being at least a hundred pages longer and reproducing the pictures in colour.
However, for what the book does have to offer it is quite good. The book is divided into seven sections, four of which are text and three of which are pictorial essays. The essays are all focused upon the central theme, yet can be read separately. Each section deals with its own topic and there is very little overlap. John Berger does a very good job at describing the effect that images have upon the mind and the mood of the viewer. A lot of care is taken to explain these passages clearly and the examples that he uses are very effective at demonstrating his case.

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.

This book has the potential to completely re-shift your understanding of art. It is about art philosophy, but much more than that, how we understand the nature of art, and how it relates to our cultures and societies. It is a book designed for the general reader, without a large art background, but also appreciable by the artist and the professional art critic.
People often look down upon the objectification of women in advertising, and how we regularly degrade women for the pleasure of a few, treating women as objects or bodies only. But then we look back on the nudes of the Renaissance or other periods and think, how beautifully made! This is truly art, after all, and not the same moral level as an underwear ad or porn. Berger destroys these myths. Yes, Rembrandt's nudes are much more artistically done than anything in advertising, but Berger shows a convincing link between the treatment of women in art of that time and art of this time. If one expands the definition of art in the modern period, the similarities are extraordinary. In Ways of Seeing Berger carefully traces how art has been used as a method of control, in general and towards women in particular. How those beautiful nudes we now see in museums were usually in wealthy men's private collections where only they could observe them- much as Playboy is today. How even the medium (oil, watercolor, film) changes the way information is forced upon us and control is asserted. Berger does this all not only through text but showing the actual paintings and pictures- indeed, over half the book is art of various sorts. It is illuminating to see an ad that obviously objectifies women, and then to see the exact same picture next to it, but of a famous oil painting that the ad was based on. I first read this work over a decade ago and it's ideas and images have never left me. Nor will they leave you.

Ways of Seeing is a small book (Penguin, 1972) of a 1972 BBC blockbuster TV series. The series was a follow up to and, in part, a reaction to Kenneth Clark's earlier, pioneering Civilisation series of 1969.

The book is poorly illustrated, but the TV series is lavish and very `visual'.

Berger's thesis is an early example of post-modern criticism - i.e., he `deconstructs' naive assumptions about visual communications (photography, advertising etc), but it is marred by many unsupported assertions and personal, emotive, psychological `arguments'.

The script of the series was written quite quickly and, actually, with little revision, Berger has admitted. And it was screened late at night because the BBC was not sure how it would be received or who would be its audience. Few realized in 1972 where advertising was going (we know now!).

Berger's thesis actually makes only four simple points. He makes them by visual means rather than words, but he often overstates them (the analogy with advertising itself is striking!). Many of them are things we are all aware of now (or at least we should be! However, it may be that they are so omnipresent now that we do not notice.).

Berger's four points:

1. (Chapter 1) Photography has changed the way we look at the world - and at art. This thesis Berger derives from Benjamin (who was of the age-group that witnessed the change). But he somewhat over-states the case.

It is a fact that the history of popular visual culture began with the invention of photography in 1839. Photography is the ultimate derivation from the detached, proto-scientific attitude of the painters of the Italian Renaissance - Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci et al - who analysed vision and representation through the `laws' of perspective.

And the camera is a machine that makes it possible for everyone - not only artists - to record and represent what they see. (Of course, since the 19th century art has had other aims than representing reality visually, although this still persists.)

2. (Chapter 3) The nude in art is a woman and a commodity made available to a male owner. Actually, however, this is not always true. Michelangelo's slave sculptures and David are visual metaphors for human struggle, dignity, independence and virtue.

To understand Berger's discussion, we need to realize that pictures of naked people (not only attractive women) - nudes - are a form of art (see Kenneth Clark's The Nude (1955)). Whereas some nudes in art are intended to titillate, most are not.

3. (Chapter 5) The possession of a painting of something is akin to possessing the thing represented. The period 1500-1900 was the era of capitalism. Oil paintings serve the need of capitalists to have valuable possessions and - thus - to celebrate their wealth. Only oil paintings can have material value. Watercolours can only have spiritual value, as in William Blake's work. (This, too, is a highly specious argument.)

History painting reinforces noble values (and so do `low-life' genre paintings - by implication, presumably). `Not so much an open window [a phrase used commonly to describe Renaissance paintings, especially landscape views from an interior] as an open safe' (p.109). This, too, is a non-argument. It ignores sculpture, for example, and other items of demonstrable capitalist wealth - stamps, antiques, land. It is true that history paintings portrayed the conservative values of the establishment (see David's Oath of the Horatii), but they were also those of the church, royalty and the nobility as well as capitalists.

4. (Chapter 7) Publicity (advertising) photographs are an extension of history painting (the representation of noble subjects), except that they aim to stimulate purchasing. This point relies on the former, i.e., that possessing a painting of a thing is akin to possessing the thing itself, and is far from established. It is true that photography in advertising (and, more recently, on TV) aims to stimulate an impulse to purchase the things illustrated, but it is a leap of logic to try to connect this with history painting.

Like Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, `The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction' - on which Ways of Seeing is based - this is an over-enthusiastic Marxist reaction to `admass' culture. In the 1970s, intellectuals were just beginning to make a serious study of advertising, entertainment and mass culture (what has now become `cultural studies').

It is an entertaining - if somewhat flawed - read.

What Art Is - and Isn't: An Aesthetic Tract

If in the anti-elitist atmosphere of the 1960s still anyone believed in the idea of the artist as a genius it was Andy Warhol who thoroughly disabused them: in his latest act of devotion and surrender to America's mass culture he develops a process that enables him to photographically transfer tabloid and advertisement pictures directly on to a silkscreen, allowing not only the infinite production of the original work but also the elimination of any apparent sign of the artist's involvement. To make his point clear he then rocks the art markets by declaring (and later retracting) that some of his work was actually executed by assistants. With some delay also art historians started to shift their attention from the retualized celebration of the artist towards the role of spectators and buyers in defining the status and value of art. It is this context in which "Ways of Seeing" has been written.
The multitude of approaches to art suggested by the book's title is also reflected in its composition - if that is the word. Although consisting of numbered essays (both verbal as well as entirely pictorial) Berger explicitly advises the reader (the text begins in a whimsical and refreshing way already on the book's jacket) to go through them in whatever order he pleases, his principal aim merely being "to raise questions". This rather capricious approach somewhat obscures the unifying - and certainly unsettling - theme of the work: instead of examining what art does to us it asks about what we - as spectators, critics, patrons, owners and buyers - are doing to art. It is about the ways in which art serves to legitimize, sustain and conceal social inequality. The central aspects are: class, gender and consumerism.
To set the stage for his study, that tellingly is confined to representational art, Berger first dismisses the traditional approach of art history as mystification. Concepts of aesthetics - and in particular those of composition - he argues, have inserted themselves between spectators and paintings to obscure and obstruct any immediate perception of the social content of pictures. In this way, terms as, for example, "spatial division", "rhythmical arrangement" and "colour contrast" are introduced in an attempt to account for the intensity and emotional charge of a picture whereas any disinterested inspection would reveal these rather to lie in the social discrepancies between the people depicted, or between their world and that of the spectator.
Once the film of scholarly mystification is removed, clarity, precision, solidity, lustre and verisimilitude reveal the main characteristic of European oil painting: the representation of material wealth. Following the ideas of Levi-Strauss, Berger explains the development of this particular art technique and art form and its phenomenal rise in the 15th century by the need of an emerging class of mercantile capitalists, and later the landed gentry, to confirm their sense of ownership and the importance of riches.
Set within a conceptual framework that charts the trajectory of European oil painting as the attempt to perfect the illusion of tangibility it is no surprise that "Ways of Seeing" gives particular attention to the depiction of women. Although the eventual observation - that it was primarily arranged to appeal to the spectator's/commissioner's sexuality - must have seemed commonplace even at the time of writing Berger, in the process of his examination, introduces some interesting ideas on the difference between "nakedness" (to be without disguise, to be oneself) and "nudity" (to be put on display in a conventualized way, to be an object) in European art.
Far less contentious than in the case of oil painting "Ways of Seeing" identifies the idea of ownership also as central to the understanding of modern advertisement. There, buying is presented as the transformation of one's self into a better, a "richer" way of living. By buying the proposed product we become the cheer- and successful people depicted and the envy of others. In this respect advertisement dwells on and stimulates the discontent with the present to hold out the future. Of course (and here "Ways of Seeing" picks up on its political theme), this hope only addresses the personal life of the individual and thereby diverts attention from the need for social change.
With the inclusion of modern advertisement "Ways of Seeing" - which after all is a very thin book - deals with five hundred years of art: its styles, techniques, genres, subjects and artists. This gives any expert sufficient room to find exceptions, omissions, contradictions and opposites and shred the book into pieces. However, "Ways of Seeing" is not written for the professional pinpointer but for the (literally speaking) wide-eyed. In a field in which increasingly more specialized books (on books on pictures) abound this is the ever noteworthy appeal to come back to our senses.

Ways of Seeing is the book of a groundbreaking and brilliant TV series that Berger created with Mike Dibb in the 1970s. The book isn't quite as amazing as the series, but it's acquired canonical status anyway as Berger's most frequently set text on art and art criticism. Which is a pity, because while the impressive confidence of Berger's judgments was inspiring back then (Marina Warner and Michael Ondaatje have each paid tribute to it), time has passed over the last quarter of a century and the book is in danger of looking old-fashioned. The theory of desire, which Berger manages to popularise in a single succinct chapter, has been challenged, confirmed, turned upside-down and generally elaborated upon so much since the book was written that his version of it is now inadequate. Advertising is vastly more sophisticated now than it was in 1972 - the ads reproduced in the book, while perfectly representative of their time, are almost laughable in their blatant sexism and classism. (You wouldn't get away with them now, that's for sure.) But the account of the rise of oil painting is still persuasive, even if it lacks the cheek and mischievousness of the TV version. Readers expecting to find Berger's most incisive and complex criticism should look elsewhere, though, to The Sense of Sight or About Looking, because Ways of Seeing is essentially a popularisation of theories that have since become much more complex, and Berger's lapidary, no-argument tone is hardly applicable anymore. Somebody should release the series on video, then we'd get the same ideas in a more engaging and fascinating manner.

This is the Berger classic that will never cease fascinating most readers. It came before more popular meditations on photography by Sontag and others, but for me this book remains the essential text for how we perceive the world around us through the art we interact with especially.

John Berger discredits other "so-called art critics" and seemingly proclaims himself an art-god. He writes as if his views are the only plausible suggestions about the meanings of the works. I find this attitude rather unpleasant. I also find his views about gender-based generalization of attitudes and women as objects of male desire (the "men act and women appear" passage) somewhat offensive.

A wonderful introductory adventure into the politics of looking. Anyone with an interest in art and cultural perception will find Berger an insightful and clever narrator.
Art students who skip this read are really missing out.

I read that this little volume was once considered the "little red book of Mao" for art students.... in other words, de rigueur for anybody who wanted to be taken seriously.

But I find the book to be more than a little dishonest. Instead of "Ways of Seeing" it might be called "Ways of Interpreting" or "Ways of Criticizing". It doesn't offer different ways of perception, just a different way of judging. A great deal of its "revelations" just seem so...completely obvious. And, worst of all, it doesn't credit its sources. The only critic mentioned by name is Walter Benjamin, and there is a passing reference to Kenneth Clark. But the book owes such a debt to Marshall McLuhan. It is even done in a style (with the bold print that some find offensive) nearly identical to McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage". And many of the ideas come from the French deconstructionists.

Never mind-- appropriation without sourcing seems to be completely acceptable now in art schools. So it's not uncommon to hear a would be art revolutionary declare that " I noticed that advertising images strongly resemble religious icons." (Yeah, sure you did...but it's okay, claiming someone else's brilliance for your own is just fine).

I'm not sure that art wouldn't have evolved and defied all the conventions of traditional oil painting and its inviolate status, without all this accompanying, miserable cant and dogma to dig through. So, I give this book one star---not because its worthless, but simply because it has assumed a status that it doesn't by any measure deserve, and because it targets areas of art (bad classical and renaissance paintings) that had already decayed into the status of kitsch. Big hairy deal.

* Late additions/ further food for thought. These quotes are from a late 1980's critique of "Ways of Seeing" by Bruck and Docker.

"Ways of Seeing was a Marxist reply to another TV series, Kenneth Clark's "Civilization". " "In the late 80's, we and our students find it odd rather than compelling, doctrinaire rather than enlightening." "The literal-mindedness of Ways of Seeing now seems quaint and absurd." "(The book) has supported leftist pessimism in media theory and now gives assistance to the puritanical critiques of the postmodernist world."

Some of that is my own paraphrasing, but go to the Wiki links for the book to read the full critique... that is, if you are open-minded to a critique.

Critics such as Berger are harmful to the cause of art. His writing is totally incomprehensible. I teach art, and therefore would expect to know what he's talking about -- but I haven't a clue. Art critics need to stop writing for EACH OTHER and start to speak the language of the common person. No wonder people feel stupid when it comes to discussing art (modern art in particular) -- the critics speak in a language that is alien to most everyone except themselves.

Almost laughably disappointing. Berger obviously has the best of intentions, but his analysis is amateurish at best, pathetically reactionary (almost to the point of seeming to whine) at worst, and largely cribbed from thinkers of far greater intellectual originality and power than himself.

For starters, he seems either ignorant of or unwilling to admit that what we broadly call 'mainstream visual art' is, was, and quite likely almost always has been directly tied up with wealth; with commissions, patronage, really with human commerce itself. Visual art isn't some pure, 'virginal' endeavor sullied by capitalism. Visual art is a creative activity which is intimately tied into and dependent on capitalism (really, on wealth) in the first place... and with displaying and re-affirming that wealth.

His naive disgust with modern capitalism's collusion with art assumes that there was some magical time when art existed in a vacuum of economic/ideological purity, unsullied by the lucre of having to actually pay someone to produce a canvas or carve a church door or gild something. If such 'pure' art even exists in the first place, Berger provides literally no evidence for it: no examples from non-western European, 'traditional' cultures or even folk arts which might conceivably hint that some people make art for nothing more than their own personal pleasure.

As if his shallow reading of these issues wasn't bad enough, he then goes on to make the utterly ludicrous claim that portraits of women, nudes, etc, show us that all women everywhere (and only ever women) are essentially shaped (really, he means warped) by the erotic gaze of male longing and domination. That's a powerful idea. It's also utterly indemonstrable and reeks of cheap psycho-analysis. Worse than that...it's a theory concocted to explain and reduce the female experience, which to be sure, has been cruelly unfair for the vast majority of human history, down into a narrow category of sexual expectation.

Has John Berger ever MET an actual woman? What could be more bigoted, what could be more misogynistic, than dismissively generalizing all members of the female sex as simply 'damaged' by the male gaze, as if a single tiny statement was enough to claim to understand the full totality of the female experience and female suffering through out history? And of course, his visual examples of this are, again, cheaply cherry picked...just a few nudes (which to be sure, are pathetically offensive). Berger manages the odd feat of trying to empathize with the female subject in art and somehow making himself come across as an arrogant misogynist in the process.

The problem with this book is that underneath it's crummy pseudo-analysis is a person who already knows how the world is to such a level of satisfaction that he has nothing left to discover or even really demonstrate about it. Capitalism? Oh it's ruined art. (Never mind telling us about what art from a non-capitalist culture is like) Women? Oh the poor things, they're so warped by male expectations its a miracle they can even stand up (Never mind that you don't relate any actual woman's experience at any point). Photography? Oh that's ruined art too by making images ubiquitous (never mind really examining photography fairly to see the myriad ways it has changed modern culture and modern art) This book proves one thing above all: the complacent intellectual smugness of the person who wrote it.

Look, the relationship between the commercial world and the ever-changing world of visual artistic endeavor is a hugely diverse and complicated subject, as is the relationship between art and advertising. As is, especially, the relationship between gender roles and visual art through out history. Thinkers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Klein, etc. have all written elegantly and movingly about these topics. John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" tries to stand on the shoulders of such thinkers and falls off on nearly every page. Largely because the only thing Berger seems to 'see' is his own self-satisfaction.

In all reality, this book is an eye-opener. Some people don't know how to respond to art, and this book gives quite an in-depth view of how to do so. I've used it for 2 classes in college, and it never gets old.

"Ways of Seeing " has become so universally available, so overused (especially in academia), and so often quoted, that it's refreshing to read the reviews of so many intelligent naysayers here. "Ways of Seeing" is perhaps mistitled in that it really proposes only one way of seeing works of art, which is as artifacts in the history of capitalism. It is propaganda, and like most propaganda, it heavily skews the evidence in favor of it's main argument, which is basically that European art from Raphael to Picasso is just a tool for enslaving women, non-Europeans and the working classes. (Warning: Berger is a real kill-joy. If you read this book and imbibe it's themes, be prepared to never innocently enjoy your favorite old masters again!) However, I would advise anyone with a serious interest in art criticism and theory to get a copy, fill the margins with notes, consult the original sources, and decide for herself/himself how well it stands up. To give just one instance of how sloppy Berger can be, I would invite the reader to consider whether he bothered to learn anything about the art of perspective drawing before indicting it as ideologically tainted, and then trashing it, all in two short paragraphs.

This is a hot little book well worth contemplating if you're aspiring to become a serious artist. For the student, novice artist, seasoned practioner or curious artlover, your money will be well spent to have this on your shelf.

Philosopher Mario Bunge once told the story of a muslim physicist who stated, nonchalantly, that "Quantum Mechanics can be inferred from The Holy Koran -conveniently interpreted." Such is the way of interpretation: once you know where you want to get at, you can start anywhere.
So does Mr Berger. Obedient to the article of faith that everything in the Western World during the last centuries has one way or the other to do with Capitalism, he set out to prove that Oil Painting and like manifestations are unconscious epiphenomena of class struggle and property relations.
With this preconception in mind he doesn't bother to investigate the true motivation of painters and patrons. It would anyway be futile because he shares Freud's irrefutability that "Every man suffers from Oedipus complex. If it doesn't show it is surely being repressed." So for him this couple standing in their garden must necessarily be showing off their property. How could it be otherwise? The same can be said about this cow: we are informed that it's not the representation of an animal but of a "piece of furniture with four legs". He quotes, and dismisses by an argument of "unconscious resistance", the position of another critic that only sees the couple's "enjoyment of nature." Of course both are unsubstantiated interpretations. What is untenable is playing down the rival as someone possessed by unconscious class prejudices.
The author condemns the European exploitation of the rest of the world yet his vision remains profoundly eurocentric. He doesn't stop for a moment to think that cows, or people or myths or whatever the subject of the capitalistic paintings he interprets, have been pictured elsewhere for a long time. Is it that Capitalism already existed 4000 years ago to inspire the representation of Egyptian furniture-cows? Marx himself would be astonished.
But the author's methods are not just questionable, they are also partly dishonest. The last chapter pretends to be a proof that Advertising as a whole is a contemporary manifestation of that same Capitalistic Unconscious. Right now I'm watching a TV commercial trying to convince me that this gel cleaner is a better product for my kitchen and bathroom than the old abrasive type. How can the author fit this into his theory of Advertising as something that "makes me envious of myself in the future?" The trick lies in sampling very specific products, such as those related to beauty or fashion. Trying to sell a cream might be a morally questionable activity, but how else if not by promising beauty or the advantages of it? So it is not about "Advertising" in general. The selection bias is well smuggled and in any case, his chain of reasoning runs backwards.
Well, maybe I'm also resisting, or acting as an unconscious agent of the Bourgeoisie. But I'm not alone: I've been told that Walt Disney did worse with Donald Duck.

Dreck, dreck, dreck, dreck,dreck, dreck, dreck, dreck, dreck, dreck,more dreck, more dreck, more dreck, more dreck, more dreck, more dreck, more dreck, and more dreck, and more dreck, and more dreck . . . you get the idea?

What a farce! As a photography instructor, just a quick glance through this book shows me the author either did too many drugs in the 60s or was overdosed by 70's Soviet propaganda or both. It teaches nothing concerning "seeing" except seeing through anti-capitalistic eyes--the same system that provides for crazy art and fortunately keeps the good quality art floating to the top like cream on milk. I was amazed that after the first couple of incoherent chapters, the samples are almost entirely comprised of seductive naked women. I think the author would revel in the artistic freedom now available now on [...] This book teaches nothing concerning seeing, art or aesthetics. My copy goes in the trash. Why do people praise this work. It reminds me of the writings of Timothy Leary, who was irrelevant then and always.

A GIFT..NO COMPLAINTS

Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television SeriesWays of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series