"Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (published 1972)

 While reading Berger's Ways of Seeing for the second time in many years, I reacted less by noting how obvious Berger's arguments were and more by realizing that the text has become somewhat dated. The technology that exists today, especially since the advent of the internet and social media, has become insidiously nuanced and Ways of Seeing had no way to predict that kind of capital evolution in terms of the creation of new ways to exploit the poor through reproduced images, i.e. how advertising now sways the public by manipulating and playing with its fears - if not so much anymore its envy.

However, Berger's classic remains a seminal text within Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. Berger explains how society has been affected by the transformation of artistic technology, from oil painting, to the camera, to publicity advertising in the modern world, and how that transformation feeds on itself as a way to stabilize and defend the values and ideologies of the wealthy classes. For example, the realism of pre-20th century oil painting was used primarily for the bourgeoisie to confirm and display to themselves their worth and value as separate from everyone else in a vain attempt to remind themselves of their properties, lineages, and cultural and social capital. The same is done in the modern world, with the camera used for commodity advertising, but influences a larger sphere by promising ideologies of upward mobility through the creation of a proliferation of envy - particularly future-self envy.

Despite all of Berger's criticisms of the artistic world, he noticeably defends the struggle to produce artistic integrity and identity. In particular, his ideas behind the self-portraits by Rembrandt are illuminating, demonstrating that as an artist grows, he has the ability to reflect on the art he produces as less of a representation but more of a question concerning the very existence of the art form itself. Early on in the text, Berger makes clear that he is not critiquing art as a practice, but expressing his concern with its dominant forms:

"Original paintings are still and silent in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follow's the traces of the painter's immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one's own act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary." (p. 31)

Berger himself is mystified by the practice of art, and sees the decay of the form as advertising has taken over the sense of presence which he claims oil paintings carry, and has replaced it with the ideas of some grand Future. His main problem, which really should be the entire world's problem, is that most forms of oil painting (and art), dictated by the upper classes, regarded life entirely as a place of objects worth a certain amount of economic value and nothing more. Even in crude representations of something transcending life (i.e. the human skull), the contradictions show in the presentation of commodities as the dominant form of value-making, whether they be still lifes of banquets (tables full of delectable fruits), big, strong, fat cows, landscapes as property, nature as "out there" and something to contemplate (landscapes).

For all this, Ways of Seeing, I believe, says much more about what we should not see and what we should begin to turn our sights on. Simply, be able to critically examine what is being sold to you - no matter what it is (food, clothes, shelter) - and be able to find the means by which you yourself can produce value with the objects you already possess; chances are, this value will have little to do with monetary consumption and more to do with its otherworldly offerings.