ways of seeing

Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” opens with a lamentation of modern society’s inability to fully grasp the original meanings and intentions of “the art of the past”. He then spends the remainder of the book providing that needed context, and as a result, shows the rather ugly side of paintings’ antiquated roles amongst the Western world’s elite. We often equate art, especially that of the Renaissance, with beauty, but Berger opens up its function as a class signifier, an ego boost, a possession to be hoarded, and a means of human objectification. In the first essay, Berger vehemently advocates an understanding of art’s history – sometimes to add a layer of beauty and depth to the art, as with his example of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield, but frequently to understand its societal importance. He makes the claim that, currently, art of the past is merely a commodity to have an imaginary price slapped on, but the old European civilizations he later examines seem to have a similar preoccupation with monetary valuation. I was pleased with his point about art critique and its ability to imprint upon paintings ideas which the original artist most likely had no intention of portraying. He quotes a writer who seems thoroughly convinced that a certain male modeling in a picture is drunk, and is bent on convincing his reader of this. Perhaps Berger is being similarly deceptive with his analysis at times; I'm sure he's aware of the self reference applicable here, and in fact hopes that his readers take his words with a grain of salt. He is clearly an advocate of new "ways of seeing", after all.

Berger continues into a discussion of female self-worth and its dependency on male opinion, showing, through generic Renaissance paintings of the nude, that this viewpoint has long been ingrained in society and is further perpetuated in visual depictions of females. To make his point, Berger generalizes to a jarring degree, implying at times that all women suffer under their own self-scrutiny, and that all males want nothing more than the objectification and possession of women. Despite his argument’s initial bite, he makes several points that strike me as undeniably true – chief among them that women, in a majority of Renaissance paintings (Berger does, for the record, give the exceptions some time in the limelight as well) are displayed to the viewer, either through placement of the body or a complacent, “come hither” expression. He does, however, ignore similar depictions of males; in fact, at the end of the essay he cements his point with the claim that similarly depicted males would prove abhorrent to the typical viewer. Berger totally sidesteps the existence of famous male nudes, like those by Michelangelo, and in doing so ignores the fact that issues of male self-worth have also long shaped society. For every female that surveys her own femininity, there is a male who surveys his masculinity. But if Berger presents these false gender dichotomies, he at least does an excellent job of discussing the viewer’s relationship to a painting, and ensuing sensations of ownership.

Essay five struck me as being the most helpful in imagining the specific context in which these dated oil paintings once lived. As Berger says, “a patron cannot be surrounded by music or poems in the same way as he is surrounded by his pictures." Paintings can indeed reach levels of cerebral flights of fancy similar to those in music and poems, but these, the old oil paintings of Europe, do not, and intentionally do not. Here we see aristocratic men surrounding themselves with realistic paintings of aristocratic men, sometimes in turn surrounding themselves with realistic paintings of aristocratic men, and so on. It is a frightening cycle of self-congratulation and affirmation which convinces the wealthy class of their own deserved brilliance.

At one point, Berger quotes a critic of his own claims, who scoffs at Berger’s insistence on the rampant materialism evident in oil paintings. Berger replies reasonably, saying that there are undoubtedly elements of nature appreciation and awe at the beauty of landscape in the paintings, but there is an overarching material motivation that is evident in the very typicality of the painting’s presentation. It is important, Berger says, to understand how exactly this majority of centuries-old art is shallow and safely repetitious of what the old society expected of art, for this allows us to appreciate the true ingenuity of “master painters”, who revel not in the expected or the profitable, but in new ideas, and in stimulating the imagination.

Overall, I find Berger’s arguments to be fascinating, and worryingly enough they mostly ring true to me (was I supposed to mostly disagree?). His endgoal isn’t to convince us of art’s depravity and hollowness, or the ceaseless corruption of society’s past and present --- no, instead Berger pleads that we open our eyes to a new way of seeing: seeing the history and context that art was once made in, in order to better understand how it should be regarded in the world today.