Ways of Seeing

A brilliant analysis of the socio-political elements of art and how the art establishment tacitly endorses them. An easy read, and helped me appreciate art on a whole other level.

My first impression of his last essay on publicity was that it's a little dated, then I thought of the facial expression of Balenciaga models and realised how wrong I was. It's outrageously easy to draw a link from the 1552 painting “The Ambassadors” and any Balenciaga model posing for the camera.

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Have to mention, the formatting of this book is proper bonkers. I assume there was a better edition of this book at some point because this paperback is so bad it actually gets kind of funny. Every example image is an oil painting reprinted in fuzzy black and white and the typeface used is all over the place throughout the whole book.

I started this book's bbc docu-series but I decided that I am not competent enough to remember some useful information for a long time without taking actual annotations so I opted for the book based on the series and I am very glad I did. Tbf I am not very knowledgeable about the interpretation of fine arts in general so I found a lot of relevant info from this book which influenced me to think more critically about these. Among all of these, I found the most interesting point to be the difference in usage and interpretation of male/female sensuality with respect to nude painting

the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura. To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not ‘permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions – whatever its direct purpose or motivation – is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

It is worth noticing that in other non-European traditions – in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre-Columbian art – nakedness is never supine in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other.

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.

Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.

Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless. Those who have the power become lovable.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

Bought this book in the strand gallery in London after hearing that it was a pioneer in proposing new ideas about how to interpret art - I came away feeling confused, maybe I was not ready or did not read in enough depth the ideas here, while sprinkled with gems of insight here and there I thought overall it offered me insufficient food for thought, and it was written in quite an academic diction which made it hard to get through for a beginner in art non fiction

An essential read. I've been making an Art History podcast for years now that falls perfectly in line with Berger's Marxist and feminist theories of art and I had never read it! One of those books that will forever change the way you see the world after reading it. I will be recommending this to everyone always sorry not sorry.

Lo primero que tengo para decir es que la edición de BBC Penguin en inglés que leí es un horror, parece literalmente un texto en Word mal formateado. Los párrafos no están justificados, la letra está en negrita (!) y las imágenes están intercaladas a lo bruto. Ahora la review propiamente dicha:

El libro viene precedido de cierta fama y me pareció estar a la altura. Berger habla desde una posición tomada, con claros elementos de Marx y un sorprendente feminismo para la época, y se centra con particular énfasis en cómo el arte se vio afectado por la irrupción del capitalismo.

El autor considera que el surgimiento y la consolidación de los óleos sobre lienzos como el formato de pintura por excelencia que persiste hasta hoy está intrínsecamente conectado con el capitalismo: su portabilidad la convierte en una mercancía intercambiable, al contrario de lo que sucedía antes de su aparición, cuando se pintaba sobre paredes o techos, sin posibilidad de remoción. En ese marco, Berger se adentra en el significado y la implicancia de las pinturas de objetos, retratos, mujeres, animales, paisajes. En todos los casos, salvando las particularidades de cada uno, el autor cree reconocer un afán de demostración de riqueza y poder, tanto de ricos sobre pobres como de hombres sobre mujeres.

De este modo, la gran parte de las obras del período 1500-1900 carecen en su opinión de un valor artístico elevado, porque se limitaban a satisfacer la demanda de aquellos que sólo querían ostentar sus riquezas. Ello sin embargo nos es ocultado a través de los denominados grandes maestros que hoy son enseñados como los máximos exponentes de sus épocas respectivas. Lejos de cuestionar a estos grandes artistas, Berger sostiene que lo que conocemos hoy como maestros no fueron más que escasas excepciones a su época que, lejos de representar al cánon en el cual se desarrollaro, lo desafiaron con altísimos costos personales. Es decir que la excepción nos es presentada como si fuera la regla, no sólo en términos de destreza artística sino especialmente en lo conceptual.

Creo que lo valioso de este librito es que aporta una mirada totalmente distinta a la de la academia e invita a la consideración de elementos adicionales, tanto históricos como simbólicos. Toda invitación al cuestionamiento es bienvenida, y creo que este libro es básicamente ello.

I ought to watch the special, too, I suppose.