John Berger, auteur, schilder en kunstcriticus, leerde ons ruim 50 jaar geleden anders naar kunst en naar beelden en foto's kijken, met een vierdelige tv-serie, waarvan dit boek de neerslag is. Noch de marxistische ondertoon, noch de intussen gemeengoed geworden ideeën, doen veel af aan de waarde van dit werk, vooral in de manier waarop het onze manier van beelden bekijken en interpreteren duidt en verdiept. Berger baseerde zich voor een groot deel op Walter Benjamins Walter Benjamin's The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

John Berger heeft geen al te hoge pet op van kunstkenners en kunsthistorici. In zijn ogen gaan hun analyses en interpretaties vaak voorbij aan een heleboel socio-culturele en maatschappelijke elementen die het bekijken van een schilderij beïnvloeden. Schoonheid, waarheid, klassenbewustzijn, smaak, vormentaal en gender. Kijken naar kunst en naar beelden is een taal op zich die door vele brillen en lenzen gelezen kan en moet worden.

Zijn diepgaande kijk-onderzoek over de interpretatie en de niet-artistieke ingrediënten van het olieverfschilderij tussen 1500 en 1900 vond ik fris en verrijkend. Met veel reproducties als voorbeelden leert hij je enkele belangrijke, fundamentele tijd- en plaatsgebonden elementen in acht nemen, waarin de rol van de opdrachtgever en diens bedoeling vaak bepalender zijn dan de talenten en kunstgrepen van de schilder.

Er zijn ook drie hoofdstukken die louter uit afbeeldingen bestaan en dan blijkt zo'n Penguin Pocket-uitgave met kleine zwart-wit-prentjes toch niet zo ideaal. Gelukkig staat het hele boek ook gewoon online, zo ontdekte ik, inclusief grotere kleurenreproducties. Dat zorgde echt wel voor een meerwaarde.

Het laatste hoofdstuk gaat over de rol en de functie van reclame. Dat was in de jaren '70 natuurlijk nog veel meer dan nu een veelbesproken issue. Veel van wat Berger hier aankaart, ben ik zelf in de middelbare school tijdens de jaren '80 tegengekomen in kritische leesteksten, waarbij ik me de woorden 'blikvangers' en 'verborgen verleiders' nog herinner. Toch duikt John Berger ook hier nog net iets dieper in de materie en stelde hij mijn eigen ways of seeing meer op scherp met opnieuw tal van geslaagde visuele voorbeelden. En dat was dan ook precies zijn bedoeling.

Böyle şahane bir kitabı siyah beyaz basan Metis'i kınıyorum. Tamamen tablolarla dolu bir kitabı siyah beyaz basmak... Akıl alır şey değil.

Berger opens this book with the claim that it is going to mostly be an edifying attempt to open a dialogue about vision and art, or at least incite the reader to start thinking for him or herself; it becomes clear pretty quickly that he is of the opinion that all thought converges rapidly & ultimately on the chronic terms, concepts and fixations of academic Marxism. Hastily and speciously reiterating Benjamin (and Heidegger, as these types like to pretend they haven't read), he gives a brief rundown on the way desire and attitude shape vision, notably leading to unfair and usually pornographic depictions of women for "the male gaze" (a phrase which Berger coined) ... he then drops the pretension of discussing art and spends the rest of the book explaining the evils of property ownership and, in a sub-McLuhanian waxing, advertising. The common motif in this book is the employment of kitsch, and the banal treatments of subject matters innate thereto, as the principle artwork discussed, such that the reader unacquainted with art will come away thinking that fewer than ten painters of intellectual interest every lived -- and, when occasionally deciding to note their existence, Berger claims that all artists who intelligently arranged their works did so solely as an explicit objection to capitalism.

This book, then, is not so much an invitation to thought as an active and seemingly deliberate attempt to instill in its reader a sort of gnostic paranoia, that all reality ultimately reduces to 'rich man bad', and that all art, emotion, and endeavour are ultimately mere functions of this noumenal truth. Indeed, its overwhelming popularity seems to have had the intended effect, being one of many precursors to the current "post-leftist" epoch which presumes the same compulsive fixation on these Marxist concepts (which even they agree are untenable and nonsensical, but which it is apparently impossible to stop repeating). It's crazy to me that drivel like this is so popular, and serves as the introduction for so many to the visual arts as a subject ... although this, indeed, explains much more about so many things that strike me as crazy in the world of letters. One could blame Berger's country of birth for such intellectual disingenuity, but he was also a failed painter: there appears to be some precedent for a link between that and maliciously ignorant political mental complexes.

Patrik Berger, legendarni hrac FC Liverpool a Sralta Praha, se nam tu pod pseudonymem John vyjadruje k obrazum a ja se divim, ze takhle chytrej chlap byl fotbalista! Kdosi mi rikal, ze to jsou dva ruzni lidi, ale ruku na srdce, kolik znate Bergeru? Ja teda jen jednoho.

Prvni tri eseje jsou dobry kladivo na palici, kdy si reknete, "ty vole, jak to, ze jsem o tom nikdy takto nepremyslel," na coz jsem si samozrejme dokazal v cuku letu odpovedet. No protoze jsi dement, Palivo. Duhh. Esej o oil painting me zarmoutil - pred par stoletimi lidi malovali olejem takovy krasny obrazy a my ted na oleji maximalne tak smazime hranolky a rizky! To jsme to klesli! Posledni esej o reklame me moc nezajimal, protoze jak reklama funguje vim naprosto presne. Vidim Jegra na plakate: objednavam sest Jegru.

8/10, doporucuji vsem lidem dobre vule, pusinky a navidenou u dalsi recenze lidicky. Balicky s donaty nebo donuty mi posilejte na adresu Literarni krumpac Palivo, Evropa 2, 90210.

Pop art-theory (it accompanied a BBC television program, that nicely distills a lot ideas about how we exist with images in the world with a mounting marxist slant channeling some Situationist concepts of the Spectacle. In a book that pulls and digests widely outside itself like this, the first essay felt surprisingly deep -- and of course turned out to be a largely a paraphrasing of Walter Benjamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I clearly need to properly read now.

A compact book filled with fantastic, radical ideas. I couldn't help admire Berger's delineation of capitalism, proprietorship, publicity, the gaze on females amongst other things. It's a remarkable book to read.

n  "We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice."n

An indispensable starting point for anyone who wants to think deeply about visual art, its meanings, and its uses in the (post)industrial age. If you're an art lover like I am (my "art" tag on a certain largely-defunct blogging platform runs to something like 1,300 images, for an account I started less than two years ago) Ways of Seeing is both troubling and extremely enriching.

Troubling because it's impossible not to feel uneasy once you start acknowledging the commodity status which is inherent to virtually all "high" art produced in the age of capitalism, whether it be an oil painting commissioned by a successful merchant in 1671 to gratify his vanity and affirm his perception of the world, or a more contemporary piece fated to become a sort of monetary storage unit for the obscenely wealthy, regardless of the artist's intent or the conditions in which it was created. (Though Berger is more concerned with older works in this short book.) Troubling also because of the ease with which artistic iconography can be used to mold subconscious perceptions, to enforce entrenched attitudes and prejudices, and to lend authority to advertisements and propaganda. (For instance, there's an excellent and much-quoted essay here on the patriarchal function of "the nude" in western art.)

Yet enriching because—well, to start with, it's always good to be attuned to the realities of the world one lives in, unpleasant or not. But also because Berger himself is not a Hater of Art or anything ridiculous like that: he simply wants us to be smarter about the way we engage with images, to internalize the notion that works are shaped by the context in which they are created and viewed, and to start to be able to pick out what is truly innovative or inspired or subversive in the visual arts by way of a contrast with what is hackneyed, safe, or insidious.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the book's origins as a TV special, Berger is about as clear and direct a prose stylist as can be imagined, and provides some great illustratory images if you can find a copy that doesn't shrink and drain them of color. (I highly recommend reading the book here, where the pics are large and vibrant.) Actually, about half the essays are entirely pictorial, chains and collages of images which we are invited to fill in with our own interpretations and associations. The whole thing could be grasped by a teenager and read in an afternoon, which is not to say that it's rudimentary or unserious. It's definitely not.

I've been depressed lately by discussions I've run into online about art and ideology, particularly regarding "modern" (i.e. abstract expressionist) works: conversations which, like so much web discourse, tend to drain the topic of all nuance and complexity in the rush to arrive at the most "correct" and politically defensible position. The advent of NFTs and the emergence of art-generating AI software are also spurring plenty of fervent discussion across the web; in other words, the nature and ethics of visual art are very far from settled issues. Though Berger himself sticks mostly to the block of centuries post-Renaissance and pre-photography, it was refreshing to be reminded of how good these kinds of conversations can be, when facilitated by someone who knows what they're talking about and wants to encourage thoughtful examination rather than algorithmic engagement.

If for my own part I've been vague about what he actually has to say, it's only because I'd rather not summarize such an already-concise and graspable work. Please read it if you can. As for me, I think it's time to dig into some Walter Benjamin.

احساس می‌کنم بعد از خوندن این کتاب، دلم می‌خواد کلاس نقاشی رنگ و روغن ثبت‌نام کنم.

Праця, яка скоріше є поглядом крізь шпарину у дверях. Наче щось помітно, але, чорт забирай, це не відкриті двері.
В універі проходили курс по історії та філософії мистецтва, пізніше розглядали об’єктивність критики Берджера в предметі реклами. На свій час, це була справді хороша робота, однак, зараз, вона лише поверхово дає аналіз.

Very interesting way to look at art and made me dig deep so with future rambles to art galleries I will be looking at it a little differently but still make my own summations on what the piece is trying to convey.

I took a star off as the pictures are tiny and not a good representation of what the book is trying to convey while you cant see every picture clearly. I know it takes on different perspectives but the general picture should be clear and had to google some pictures to really see them.

Overall a good addition to my library.

Almost laughably disappointing. Berger obviously has the best of intentions, but his analysis is amateurish at best, pathetically reactionary (almost to the point of seeming to whine) at worst, and largely cribbed from thinkers of far greater intellectual originality and power than himself.

For starters, he seems either ignorant of or unwilling to admit that what we broadly call 'mainstream visual art' is, was, and quite likely almost always has been directly tied up with wealth; with commissions, patronage, really with human commerce itself. Visual art isn't some pure, 'virginal' endeavor sullied by capitalism. Visual art is a creative activity which is intimately tied into and dependent on capitalism (really, on wealth) in the first place... and with displaying and re-affirming that wealth.

His naive disgust with modern capitalism's collusion with art assumes that there was some magical time when art existed in a vacuum of economic/ideological purity, unsullied by the lucre of having to actually pay someone to produce a canvas or carve a church door or gild something. If such 'pure' art even exists in the first place, Berger provides literally no evidence for it: no examples from non-western European, 'traditional' cultures or even folk arts which might conceivably hint that some people make art for nothing more than their own personal pleasure.

As if his shallow reading of these issues wasn't bad enough, he then goes on to make the utterly ludicrous claim that portraits of women, nudes, etc, show us that all women everywhere (and only ever women) are essentially shaped (really, he means warped) by the erotic gaze of male longing and domination. That's a powerful idea. It's also utterly indemonstrable and reeks of cheap psycho-analysis. Worse than that...it's a theory concocted to explain and reduce the female experience, which to be sure, has been cruelly unfair for the vast majority of human history, down into a narrow category of sexual expectation.

Has John Berger ever MET an actual woman? What could be more bigoted, what could be more misogynistic, than dismissively generalizing all members of the female sex as simply 'damaged' by the male gaze, as if a single tiny statement was enough to claim to understand the full totality of the female experience and female suffering through out history? And of course, his visual examples of this are, again, cheaply cherry picked...just a few nudes (which to be sure, are pathetically offensive). Berger manages the odd feat of trying to empathize with the female subject in art and somehow making himself come across as an arrogant misogynist in the process.

The problem with this book is that underneath it's crummy pseudo-analysis is a person who already knows how the world is to such a level of satisfaction that he has nothing left to discover or even really demonstrate about it. Capitalism? Oh it's ruined art. (Never mind telling us about what art from a non-capitalist culture is like) Women? Oh the poor things, they're so warped by male expectations its a miracle they can even stand up (Never mind that you don't relate any actual woman's experience at any point). Photography? Oh that's ruined art too by making images ubiquitous (never mind really examining photography fairly to see the myriad ways it has changed modern culture and modern art) This book proves one thing above all: the complacent intellectual smugness of the person who wrote it.

Look, the relationship between the commercial world and the ever-changing world of visual artistic endeavor is a hugely diverse and complicated subject, as is the relationship between art and advertising. As is, especially, the relationship between gender roles and visual art through out history. Thinkers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Klein, etc. have all written elegantly and movingly about these topics. John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" tries to stand on the shoulders of such thinkers and falls off on nearly every page. Largely because the only thing Berger seems to 'see' is his own self-satisfaction.

کسی که این کتاب رو بهم هدیه داد در موردش گفت که "این کتاب با تمام کم حجم و کوتاه بودنش یکی از بهترین کتاباییه که خوندم" منم در موردش همین رو میتونم بگم. کتاب شرح رک و پوست کنده ای از تصاویر به خصوص نقاشی های رنگ و روغن دوران رنسانس و ردپای سرمایه داری و قدرت طلبی (فصل ۲) و تبلیغات و تاثیرات اونها و روشی که برای جلب ببیننده استفاده میکننه(فصل ۳). از صراحت جان برجر لذت بردم. من تقریبا هر فصل رو چهار بار خوندم چون میخوام مدام یادم باشه وقتی در برابر تصویری قرار گرفتم این شیوه از نگریستن هم مد نظر داشته باشم. خیلی خیلی توصیه میکنم. خصوصا به افرادی که با هنر در ارتباطن‌‌.