Rating: - On art and society
If in the anti-elitist atmosphere of the 1960s still anyone believed in the idea of the artist as a genius it was Andy Warhol who thoroughly disabused them: in his latest act of devotion and surrender to America's mass culture he develops a process that enables him to photographically transfer tabloid and advertisement pictures directly on to a silkscreen, allowing not only the infinite production of the original work but also the elimination of any apparent sign of the artist's involvement. To make his point clear he then rocks the art markets by declaring (and later retracting) that some of his work was actually executed by assistants. With some delay also art historians started to shift their attention from the retualized celebration of the artist towards the role of spectators and buyers in defining the status and value of art. It is this context in which "Ways of Seeing" has been written.

The multitude of approaches to art suggested by the book's title is also reflected in its composition - if that is the word. Although consisting of numbered essays (both verbal as well as entirely pictorial) Berger explicitly advises the reader (the text begins in a whimsical and refreshing way already on the book's jacket) to go through them in whatever order he pleases, his principal aim merely being "to raise questions". This rather capricious approach somewhat obscures the unifying - and certainly unsettling - theme of the work: instead of examining what art does to us it asks about what we - as spectators, critics, patrons, owners and buyers - are doing to art. It is about the ways in which art serves to legitimize, sustain and conceal social inequality. The central aspects are: class, gender and consumerism.

To set the stage for his study, that tellingly is confined to representational art, Berger first dismisses the traditional approach of art history as mystification. Concepts of aesthetics - and in particular those of composition - he argues, have inserted themselves between spectators and paintings to obscure and obstruct any immediate perception of the social content of pictures. In this way, terms as, for example, "spatial division", "rhythmical arrangement" and "colour contrast" are introduced in an attempt to account for the intensity and emotional charge of a picture whereas any disinterested inspection would reveal these rather to lie in the social discrepancies between the people depicted, or between their world and that of the spectator.

Once the film of scholarly mystification is removed, clarity, precision, solidity, lustre and verisimilitude reveal the main characteristic of European oil painting: the representation of material wealth. Following the ideas of Levi-Strauss, Berger explains the development of this particular art technique and art form and its phenomenal rise in the 15th century by the need of an emerging class of mercantile capitalists, and later the landed gentry, to confirm their sense of ownership and the importance of riches.

Set within a conceptual framework that charts the trajectory of European oil painting as the attempt to perfect the illusion of tangibility it is no surprise that "Ways of Seeing" gives particular attention to the depiction of women. Although the eventual observation - that it was primarily arranged to appeal to the spectator's/commissioner's sexuality - must have seemed commonplace even at the time of writing Berger, in the process of his examination, introduces some interesting ideas on the difference between "nakedness" (to be without disguise, to be oneself) and "nudity" (to be put on display in a conventualized way, to be an object) in European art.

Far less contentious than in the case of oil painting "Ways of Seeing" identifies the idea of ownership also as central to the understanding of modern advertisement. There, buying is presented as the transformation of one's self into a better, a "richer" way of living. By buying the proposed product we become the cheer- and successful people depicted and the envy of others. In this respect advertisement dwells on and stimulates the discontent with the present to hold out the future. Of course (and here "Ways of Seeing" picks up on its political theme), this hope only addresses the personal life of the individual and thereby diverts attention from the need for social change.

With the inclusion of modern advertisement "Ways of Seeing" - which after all is a very thin book - deals with five hundred years of art: its styles, techniques, genres, subjects and artists. This gives any expert sufficient room to find exceptions, omissions, contradictions and opposites and shred the book into pieces. However, "Ways of Seeing" is not written for the professional pinpointer but for the (literally speaking) wide-eyed. In a field in which increasingly more specialized books (on books on pictures) abound this is the ever noteworthy appeal to come back to our senses.