Here are some reductive summaries of the seven chapters in this book.

Chapter 1: Art galleries are dumb, memes are the future.
Chapter 2: Tits!
Chapter 3: Men like looking at women, and pretending women are to blame for it.
Chapter 4: Uh, art? I really don't know, there were runs of themes but nothing across everything.
Chapter 5: Turns out they were all oil paintings. Apparently oil paintings are about owning things, where 'things' can be anything.
Chapter 6: Different kinds of people. And horses. And dogs. No idea.
Chapter 7: Adverts are a bit like oil paintings because they're about stuff.

Okay, it might be apparent that I didn't really like this. Part of this is down to Berger's style, which seems to involve making weird and unsubstantiated claims, and then expanding airily on those claims. There are a bunch of points Berger does this in the text, but they are particularly galling when he does it with regard to the illustrations. Some examples:

1. Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House by Frans Hals: Berger instructs that we 'judge for yourself' about whether Hals painted some criticism of the Governesses. Well, I did, and I can't see anything to suggest that, and neither do I come away thinking that I 'know the personality traits and even habits' of the subjects, as both he and the author he quotes suggest I should.
2. La Grande Odalisque by Ingres: Berger says the two women have similar expressions. No, the one looks sleepy or perhaps embarrassed and the other flirtatious.
3. The Ambassadors by Holbein: Berger says that 'every square inch' of the painting appeals to the sense of touch. It doesn't. I couldn't even tell that anything was meant to be metal until I read Berger's description. My first impression was that the two subjects look staggeringly similar, and the distorted skull is weird and looks like a rendering issue.
4. Mr and Mrs Andrews by Gainsborough: Berger says that the landowners' 'proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them' is evident in their stance and expressions. I can't see anything of the sort, they just look sort of squinty.

Maybe I'm just not good at the sort of interpretation Berger likes to imagine for art. I certainly didn't get any sense of narrative in the three purely visual chapters, and struggled to even see any kind of point in any of the portfolios.

My issues with Berger are larger than simply not being able to see what he sees in art, though. The title of the book is 'Ways of Seeing', and it is hard for me to escape the impression that what this refers to more than anything is the ability of art critics to see their own politics in art, regardless of anything actually visible in the piece itself. This is demonstrated by his own example. Aside from the first chapter, which presented the most convincing thesis (about shifts in the value of art), his textual chapters read like a 70's liberal hit list: he sees as important about art the objectification of women, 'possessions', and capitalism. There is no mention of realism/fabulism or anything important in different schools of art, and throughout it all he adopts a critical tone about the hegemony of European art -- despite including very few and primitive examples from any other source.

I thought with the nudes he had a glimmer of a point -- the women are being objectified, and sometimes they are even being contorted so that they can be nude to the viewer. But this is almost a foundational premise of that whole class of art, and it's hardly shocking to learn that pictures of naked ladies are mostly for the pleasure of men. And, you know, for all that Berger lectures about issues with the nude, he sure seems to include a lot of them in his book. And I don't just mean in the chapters discussing nudes. Every single chapter has multiple nudes in it, though they are rarely central to anything he discusses. I wonder whether Berger himself considers his reader to be male?

Regarding oil paintings and ownership, his argument seems highly contorted and bizarre, and he seems to stretch very hard to bring in snippets like "if a man stole a potato he risked a public whipping" which reinforce his narrative of wealth and possession and oppression without actually having anything to do with any art. Why is it that oil paintings in particular are about 'owning' the pictured thing, when that 'thing' can be anything from a landscape to people to a story to an ideal? After reading Berger, I still don't know why he thinks this, and really I grow more suspicious that he just wanted to make some appropriately Marxist noises. His analysis of advertising is less objectionable -- who doesn't find adverts annoying? -- but seems somewhat unstable when balanced on top of his wobbly oil painting thesis. He makes a series of assertions about what advertising images are, but again fails to substantiate most of these.

I think the idea, really, is that you have to enter the book either 1) already agreeing with John Berger about everything, possibly because you're a liberal university student in the '70s or 2) willing to let John Berger just make sweeping statements which you will accept. The ideas in the first chapter are the most interesting, and I think the most well-argued of them all. No doubt the rest is useful as a possible perspective for thinking about art, but there is no real information being communicated here that isn't already communicated by the politics of half a century ago.

Ocak ayında kaybettiğimiz John Berger'in BBC için hazırladığı programın araştırma kitabı bu. İsteyenler youtube üzerinden bu 4 bölümlük mini diziyi izleyebilirler. Şahsen ben o diziyi izledikten sonra bu kitabı öğrendim. BBC serisi beni daha çok etkilese de kitap ayrıntılı bilgiler içeriyor.
Dizilere paralel şekilde 4 ana bölümü var:
Özellikle fotoğraf makinesi ve kopyalama olanaklarının artması nedeniyle imgelerin anlamının değiştiğini görüyoruz. Biricik sanat eseri kavramı artık eskisi gibi değil, imgelere bölünerek anlamı çoğaltılılıyor ve yönlendiriliyor.
2.bölüm Avrupa yağlıboya resimlerinde nü kavramı ve kadın algımıza yarattığı etki üzerine. Erkeğin gözleyen kadının ise gözlenen olması, seyredilmesi. Çoğu nü tablonun aslında seyredenin isteklerine göre yaratılmış olması.
3.bölümde yağlıboya resimlerin aslında üst sınıf mülkiyetinin kafa kağıdı olduğunu görüyoruz. Elbet tarihi kazananlar yazıyorsa, özenerek baktığımız sanat eserlerinde de kazananları göreceğiz.
Ve imgelerin yolculuğunun günümüz kapitalizminde son bulduğu 4. bölüm. Reklamlar Avrupa görsel sanatının ölümünün ilanı ve biz gösterilen bu havucun peşinde koşturup duruyoruz.
Bence John Berger kral çıplak demiş, belki de bu yüzden pek sevilmiyordur. Ben ise ezberbozanlardan yanayım.

Mítico libro que comentar con alguien para entender del todo (un poco como todos en verdunch S/o Carmen Martín-Gaite). Me encantó el capítulo hablando de la mirada masculina y el desnudo (con sus obvias problemáticas, es un libro que casi tiene 60 años).

Si pensamos en un lienzo de un desnudo europeo estándar, vemos que el protagonista nunca está pintado, es el espectador del cuadro y se asume que es un hombre.

Me ha sido horrible ver que hay comportamientos que se critican en este libro y que sigo repitiendo. Pero solo queda ser consciente y consecuente con ellos.

La parte de la publicidad es brutal.

La búsqueda de la felicidad individual ha sido reconocida como un derecho universal. Sin embargo, las condiciones sociales existentes hacen que el individuo se sienta impotente. Vive en la contradicción entre lo que es y lo que le gustaría ser. O se vuelve entonces plenamente consciente de la contradicción y sus causas y se une así a la lucha política por una democracia plena que implica, entre otras cosas, el derrocamiento del capitalismo; o vive continuamente sujeto a una envidia que, combinada con su sensación de impotencia, se disuelve en ensoñaciones recurrentes.

This was intended as a companion to a television series, and perhaps it's best to reference it to another well-known book of Big Ideas intended as a companion to a television series, Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. Given that they are both wedded to some teee veee, they're both kinda superficial. Berger is at his best when he is talking about specific paintings and how they can be interpreted. He is at his worst when he's doing art history for dummies and also trying to do Marxism for dummies, and it (unsurprisingly) comes off as Walter Benjamin for dummies. In the same way that Joseph Campbell does Carl Jung for dummies. I am not a dummy, or at least I don't think I am. So I don't need Ways of Seeing, really (and I definitely don't need Joseph Campbell in any way, shape, or form).

«تبلیغات حتی می‌تواند انقلاب را به زبان خود ترجمه کند.»

فکر می‌کردم قراره یک کتاب آلن‌دوباتنی باشه درباره دیدن و نحوه تحلیل آثار هنری. اما بحثاش کمی عمیق‌تر و سخت‌درک‌تر بود و شاید کمی تخصصی‌تر. برای کسی می‌تونست جذاب باشه که علاقه به تاریخ هنر و فلسفه هنر داشته باشه. بخش سوم‌اش رو کمتر می‌فهمیدم اما بخش‌های دیگه با دقیق خوندن؛ درنهایت قابل فهم بود!

This book is hands down amazing.

YouTube kanalımda sizin için sanata en iyi başlangıç kitaplarını önerdim ve bu kitabı da yorumladım: https://youtu.be/PegBH1HDrr0

Nü tabloların ve kadınların çıplak resmedildiği sanatsal çalışmaların erkeklerin başarısızlıkları karşı bir avunma oluşu erkeklerin o zamanki görsel açlığını doyurması için yapılmış olabilir. Cinselliğin gizemli ve erkek için olması nü tablolarda görülen bir durum.

Görünüşe sahip olmak ve resme sahip olmak arasında ince bir çizgi var. Biz beğendiğimiz bir resmi aldığımızda ona sahip olmuş gibi bir kibre bürünürüz.

Kadınları nesneleştiren her sanatsal çalışma reklamda da karşılığını bir şekilde bulabiliyor. Resmi bilgi ve mülkün karışımı olarak gören zenginler kendilerine nedensel bir taban bulabiliyor.

Görme Biçimleri kitabı da zaten bu konuları anlattığı için sanat alanında çok farklı bir bakış açısına sahip, herkese öneriyorum.

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, based on a  four-part 1972 BBC documentary series of the same name,  is considered one of the most influential and accessible works of writing about art in the English language — and rightly so. Consisting of four textual essays and three picture essays bereft of text, this book deconstructs the dominant cultural ‘gaze’ towards art and connects it with the way we regard and ascribe meaning, both to works of art and to the world around us.
Particularly insightful, even path-breaking, is the essay on the tradition of the Nude and how it relates to the power (and gender) dynamics between the surveyed and the surveyor. It is here that Berger illustrates the social existence of men as subjects and women as objects:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself (…) 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 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 (…) 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.”

The distinction created here between nakedness and nudity is also notable:

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude (…) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”

One of the most important tasks performed in Ways of Seeing is that it democratises art and meaning-making, freeing it from the mystification of the art-critic and the exclusive enjoyment of the status-quo (a function also performed, albeit differently, by the invention of camera and the possibility of reproduction – both ideas dealt with in the first essay in this volume). I also found the essay on the Publicity Image and Advertising to be a particularly important theoretical intervention, revealing publicity as both a tradition of continuity and a break from the oil painting as a methodical construction of a new aspirational way of seeing (while seeing the same things: prosperity and happiness), situating envy and glamour as its centerpiece.

Despite being written in the 1970s, Ways of Seeing continues to be a thoroughly important and relevant read, well into the second decade of the 21st century. I would, however, advise a word of caution with regards to its eurocentrism (and certain incorrect notions about art in the East, especially with regards women and sexuality) in some places.

Note on the Penguin Edition
Given that one of the chief aims of this book is to demystify and democratise art appreciation, it makes sense that this book appears as a paperback instead of the more thematically-appropriate coffee-table format. However, what makes no sense whatsoever is that the entire book is set in a headache-inducing bold sans-serif font. My second reading of this book was from an e-copy, but the typeset was still bold and only marginally less annoying. Moreover, I’m glad that I read this in an age when paintings can be looked up on the internet, because the miniature black-and-white reproductions printed in the book are barely decipherable, let alone offering a chance for the kind of assessment this book recommends. The Penguin paperback edition of Ways of Seeing is paradoxically at odds with the book’s intrinstic argument for accessibility; a visual iteration of the value-divide between authors and publishers if you will.

this was such an accessible little introduction to berger's criticism and left me with a ton to chew over re: visual art + media and the ways in which our perception is (subtly and not-so-subtly) steered by socioeconomics. can't recommend enough, especially if you want to get into nonfiction!

62nd book of 2020.

20th April, my birthday. I got this as a present today, and have spent the day, on and off, reading it (between cake and beer and garden sunshine). This is usually regarded as the 'most influential' book on art ever, or at least one of them. Berger writes in a clean, no-nonsense kind of way. Despite discussing nudity in art, or the history of art, or discussing the paintings printed in the book, it's never hard to follow. I suppose someone with even no background interest in art could read it without any trouble. That being said, without any interest in art, I'd say this book wouldn't be for you. Though the book is 'Ways of Seeing' - that is very much in relation to art. A more suitable name may be 'Ways of Seeing Art'. Though, the final essay on capitalism/consumerism and publicity is very interesting, whatever your passions are.

But, as for me, an art lover, I found this deeply insightful and fascinating. And Berger's writing was just an added bonus as he takes us on this short romp through art. There are many reproductions of art inside, and for some reason, the text is all bold. Not sure whose bright idea that was.

If you are really impatient, you may go and see Trevor's brilliant review for this book. Otherwise you may wait a few weeks for mine - I don't think it would be fair to review the book without seeing the documentary.