Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Many Issues of Art - Essay Example

Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Many Issues of Art Berger is intent to challenge ways of looking at art and other images that ignore the status of works of art as commodities. He completely re-shifts the readers 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. 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. On the pseudo-academic side, 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. 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. 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. Ways of seeing has some interesting ideas, but without thoughtful coherent expansion. It had some insights, but overall, I found myself quite disappointed by it. Dedicated to attacking the viewpoint of the privileged lite creators of high-art standards of correctness with very little basis for such attacks, ways of seeing seems to be filled with implicit assumptions that are neither inherently obvious nor easily divined from the context of the text. In the first essay, Ways of Seeing attacks art history, quoting pages of an art history book on Frans Hals, saying that it demonstrates mystification by focusing on technical aspects such as contrast and texture. Yet Berger does not make clear why the privileged perspective of Hals work that focuses more on the nature of the painting itself than the message it conveys is less correct than some other way of interpreting Hals work. While he claims such methods of interpretation and analysis of art are tools of the privileged ruling class to enforce their privilege, this fact does not make such methods of interpretation and analysis less correct than methods that are not used as tools for enforcing ruling class hegemony. His attacks on the baselessness and viciousness of art history are especially grating given the glibness of his own analysis of art: in the middle of essay 5, Berger asserts, after handily dismissing mythological paintings as vacuous, that paintings of the poor "assert two things: that the poor are happy, and that the better off are a source of hope for the world," based on the evidence that the poor people in painting are smiling. In the end of essay 5, he says that an early painting by Rembrandt "as a whole remains an advertisement for the sitter's good fortune. (in this case Rembrandt's own.) And like all such advertisements it is heartless." What more evidence does Berger have in claiming that pictures of the poor are intended to convey the happiness of the poor and the hope supplied by the privileged classes or that Rembrandt intended the painting as an advertisement of his good fortune than Seymour Slive, the author of the Frans Hals work, has in asserting that Hals did not paint his portrait of the governors and governesses of the alms house in a spirit of bitterness Even assuming that Berger has a superior ability to interpret paintings that makes his statement that Rembrandt's self-portrait was intended as an advertisement of himself more valid than Slive's statement that Hals' portrait wasn't painted in a spirit of bitterness, why is such an advertisement of one's good fortune heartless John Berger doesn't explain why. If it is because self-advertisement is a tool of the ruling class to maintain dominance, and because such tools to maintain the dominance of the ruling class put function first and artistic merit second, and because art which puts function first and artistic merit second is heartless, then Berger never makes such a connection clear. Similarly, in the same essay, he discusses originals of works of famous art, calling the religiosity that surrounds art of high market value "bogus." Once again, one wonders whether he even asked himself, "if people attach great value to the originality of a work of art, what makes the value attached to the originality less valid than the value attached to the image conveyed" Berger apparently believes that art has some form of objective value independent of the spectator of the art, but he fails to explain what that value is. I also found the second essay on nudes is also frustrating in its glibness and dogmatism. For example, starting out, Berger asserts that "a man's presence is dependent on the promise of power which he embodies," whereas "a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself." It is notable that the previous two quotes do not concern the portrayal of men and women in art, but the actual social presence of real life, flesh-and-blood men and women. While Berger could make the case that men and women's presences were determined by gender by their power and view of self, respectively, to persuade most people -- who, I would guess, would say that anyone's social presence is determined by a variety of factors, including gender, the circumstances of the situation, power, and view of self -- he must address other, more common ways of looking at social presence, which he does not. In my view, the element of the book which I found most interesting and plausible was the last essay, that on publicity. This one, I found fairly clearly written, although I did not always agree with it, relative to the others. The last essay is at least coherent and thought provoking. REFERENCES Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin UK. 1990 Read More