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Title: Ways of Seeing by John Berger ISBN: 0-14-013515-4 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: January, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (26 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A classic that's becoming outdated
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Remains a classic popular intro to many issues in art
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: Pseudo-academic
Comment: 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.
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Title: About Looking by John Berger ISBN: 0679736557 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: On Photography by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0312420099 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture by Stuart Ewen ISBN: 0465001017 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard ISBN: 0374521344 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1982 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Another Way of Telling by John Berger ISBN: 0679737243 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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