Ways of Seeing

(by John Berger)

I missed last month’s nonfiction book club meeting because I was in New Orleans to see Taylor Swift, but I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book for literally a decade, so I got it from the library anyway. I had been expecting a “how to look at art” kind of book, but this is more “oil paintings and advertising through an anti-capitalist lens,” so manage your expectations accordingly.

The book consists of four essays that are made up of words and images and three essays that are images only; these latter felt hard to appreciate given the small size of many of the images and the fact that this book is printed in black and white. (I did go online to look at a few of the images, such as The Ambassadors, in full color.) The first essay is heavily indebted to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. As this book puts it: “When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image” and the image’s “meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.” But there is still something about seeing an original painting in person: the viewer “follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures” and 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.”

Elsewhere in the book, the text explores nudes/the male gaze and painting as “an instrument of possession” in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss; it ties the “period of the traditional oil painting” (defined here as 1500ish to 1900ish) to a worldview “which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” in which “everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.” This is taken further in the final essay, which is about advertising and how there is a “direct continuity” between the “language of publicity” and “that of oil painting,” both of which are about the acquiring of and performance of and display of status. Advertising, to quote that final essay, “turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice.” Which doesn’t feel like a groundbreaking thing, from this reader’s vantage point in 2024, but does feel like a thing it can be useful to be reminded of.