"Bir şeyi gördükten hemen sonra, aynı zamanda kendimizin görülebileceğini de farkederiz. Karşımızdakinin gözleri bizimkilerle birleşerek görünenler dünyasının bir parçası olduğumuza bütünüyle inandırır bizi."

مقالات عن الفن وعن كيفية رؤية الفرد لعمل فني ما، الواضح أنه الكتاب مخصص للقراء الهواة وعلشان كده مفيش مصطلحات مهنية مستخدمة، علشان كده الكتاب سهل نوعًا ما لكن الرسومات مش واضحة وباهتة ومش هتقدر تفهم اللي بيقوله إلا لو عملت سيرش على اللوحة. سلسة الفيديوهات المُعدّة من قبل الbbc
أفضل من الكتاب. هايلي ريكومندد.

Weird little book. It provides ample visual examples to back up its various points of view, but all of them are tiny, grayscale reproductions of historically significant oil paintings. The diminutive print also really is all in bold, as some other reviewers have mentioned, and somewhat eccentrically laid out. The whole packaging is weird. Maybe they gave this to an intern. Maybe someone was on the verge of leaving on burnout. I don't know.

I can absolutely get on board with the views expressed. They run along the lines of developing an awareness against women's exploitation, consumers' exploitation, and so on and so forth. Great. But aside from a few inspired passages here and there, the writing felt a little juvenile and repetitive, and with the general appearance of the book already being an issue, the impression this read leaves on me is kinda meh.

Disappointed.

Iki pasiimdama iš bibliotekos galvojau, kad knygos pavadinimas yra "Kaip menas moko mąstyti", todėl nustebau, kad visgi ne. Nepasidaviau ir nepasiduodu - tikriausiai spontaniškai užklausta pasakyčiau savo, o ne tikrąjį knygos pavadinimą.

Labai gera trumpa knyga, uždedanti kelis svarbius akcentus, kurių pats svarbiausias - žiūrint į meno kūrinį reikia turėti omenyje ne tik tai ar tuos, kas pavaizduoti, ir tą, kuris pavaizdavo, tačiau ir tą, kuris žiūrės, nes jam pirmiausia šis menas ir skirtas.

Hiç bitmesin istediğim bir sohbet gibiydi... Özellikle reklam ile ilgili olan kısımlarını çok severek okudum.

A determinate and important read for anyone concerned with art, making a handful strong statements that are interesting and important to think about.



Ways of Seeing was first published in the 70s and is derived from a TV series of the same name. It's a collection of seven essays that deal with art criticism, how we understand art and how we come to determine its merits, pointing at a lot that should be reconsidered.

There's no objectivity in art. Berger successfully explains how what we see is influenced by what we believe and know. Reading images feels intuitive to us, since it's the most immediate way of communicating. As Berger points out in the opening sequence:

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. [Seeing also] establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it."

Because we do so much of this seeing, it's important to become aware of what we're doing there. There's one essay which talks about the difference between the nude and being naked and thematises what would later be termed the male gaze and how those traditional Western oil paintings were a way of showing possession, wealth and status. Those beautiful hairless female bodies were rarely (if ever) about the women themselves, but about what their existence meant for the spectator / owner.

He bridges the gap between Renaissance oil paintings and modern publicity. In his last essay he handles the issue of why advertisement is so absurd and yet so effective. As he points out, what people are trying to sell us is the future – a future in which we can be envied and desired. It's a depressing thought, but sadly doesn't feel altogether wrong:

"The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product."

This book was a lot harsher and more radical in its condemnation of traditional Western art than I expected it to be, but the points made were all interesting to consider. However, people who already have firm knowledge of contemporary art criticism will probably be familiar with most of these arguments, so this really just felt like a starting point.

3/5

Viena vertus, greitai skaitoma ir nesunkiai suprantama, net tokiai ne ekspertei kaip aš. Kita vertus, truputį per paprasta, net tokiai ne ekspertei kaip aš. Gausu gerų minčių – apie meno atkartojimą šiuolaikinėje reklamoje, meno vertę, moterų ir vyrų vaidmenis ir atvaizdus mene, bet man jau buvo girdėta – dalis studijuojant žurnalistiką ir reklamą, dalis – iš lyčių studijų, kita – iš filosofijos ir sociologijos. Todėl vadinkime tai tiesiog nebloga įžanga – tik tikriausiai geriau tinkama prieš aukštuosius mokslus, arba juos ėjus kažkokioje labai labai nuo meno nutolusioje srityje. Man pasirodė keista, kad knyga parašyta 4 autorių IR John Bergerio, bet ant viršelio įvardintas tik jis vienas. Keista buvo ir kiek daug kalbama apie kapitalizmą ir kiek daug dėmesio skiriama tam, kad viskas mene kažkam priklauso ir bandoma tą priklausomumo santykį išreikšti – per moterų, gyvūnų, namų, žemių vaizdavimą.

Nesiginčiju su autoriumi ir neabejoju jo visapusiškai geresniu temos išmanymu, bet kai kur pasirodė labai pritempta – na, maždaug moteris visur sekso objektas, išskyrus gal keliasdešimt atvejų, kai vis tiek nuoga, bet ownina tą savo nuogumą per odos netobulumą (vis tiek vyro nutapytą) ir per kitokią nei įprastai pozą (bet vis tiek nuogai būnant autoriaus lovoje). Kartais sutikčiau, bet abejoju, ar kalbant apie 16-18 a. meną galima manyti, kad nuoga moteris vis tiek turėjo daugiau vaidmenų, nei tuos kelis – tiek mene, tiek už jo ribų. Buvo ir nemenkas socializmo, marksizmo vaibas, per kurį Bergeris gali matyti kiek tinkamas, bet man prailgo (net jei knyga šiaip suskaitoma ir per kelias valandas) ir aš per jį meno matyti nenoriu. Galiausiai, tikėjausi daugiau meno kūrinių sugretinimo, „x dažniausiai reikšdavo y“ tipo įprastų simbolių paaiškinimo, bet gavau nemažai autoriaus politinių pažiūrų ir idėjų, kurios įdomios, bet jau girdėtos. Skaityti galima, bet ar labai rekomenduočiau – abejoju.

Very interesting vibey book about Sight. A real fun one in terms of both content and form. Every word is in bold EXCEPT the bolded ones!

The book contains a series of essays, all related to art. I read this collection right after having come back from London – having spent days surrounded by art works. I had a million thoughts about art itself and museums, and art works in museums. I wrote out some of my thoughts and then came across some of the same ideas in this insightful beautiful booklet. Perhaps this is why I feel so strongly towards the first of the essays.
Nevertheless, I try here to capture the essence of it, in some quotes that I deem crucial:

I:
•tAn image became a record of how X had seen Y.
•tThe way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe
•tIf we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this – an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things'.
•tAn image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing.
•tYet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.
•tIn the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.
•tToday we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
•tThe art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose

III:
•t[A woman’s] nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.
•tAlmost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal – either literally or metaphorically – because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it.
•tHere and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman’s body helps towards the same end. Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion
•tIt is worth noticing that in other non-European traditions – in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre-Columbian art – nakedness is never supine in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other.

V:
•t“What distinguishes oil painting from any other form of painting is its special ability to render the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on. Although its painted images are two-dimensional, its potential of illusionism is far greater than that of sculpture, for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space and, by implication, filling the entire world.”
•t“Oil paintings often depict things. Things which in reality are buyable. To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting you buy also the look of the thing it represents.”
•t“The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class”
•t“Such a painting is a demonstration of more than the virtuosity of the artist. It confirms the owner’s wealth and habitual style of living”
•t“Works of art in earlier traditions celebrated wealth. But wealth was then a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth – which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.”
•t“Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.”

This book though initially written in 1972 is still relevant to the reader today especially the essays dealing with the way women are seen in society. It is composed of seven essys, four use words and images, three only images. It discusses how women are view in society with an emphasis and concentration on European or Western culture. The images are from ads and famous European paintings. Being that I work in a museum and see paintings all day long this aspect interests me in particular.

Basically the book is saying that in our European based culture women are objects, men are subjects. Men survey, women are surveyed. Since women are always on display in our society, they adjust their behaviour in order to please and fit in with our male dominated society.

I reference this book many times in my own personal writings. What Mr. Berger has written still has value today. Actually in many ways not much has changed for women. We in the USA and Western Europe are a little better off because we can work, make money and have legal rights but that is not true for women in the rest of the world. Living in a Democratic or secular society does give women more control over their lives as opposed to dictatorships and theocracies. However even in the United States our actions as women and men are based on social constructs and society's defintions of how men and women should behave towards each other. Even how women view and interact with each other to the point that women are very competitive, jealous and vindictive in order to get or keep a man. But that is another story for discussion in the essays I have written.

“A minute in the world’s life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate… give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time.”
-Paul Cézanne

Ways of Seeing which is a series of essays and images, is based on the BBC television series which was broadcast in 1972.
The book mainly focuses on how throughout the history of art women were depicted and perceived, comparing classic oil paintings with modern images used for advertisement purposes.

Superb. A wonderful, succinct, concise, and pithy discussion of the history of imagery. How we got from the world of the oil painting to the world of television commercials. Great pick for anyone frustrated with --or mystified by-- 'the arts'.