Ways of Seeing

I thought Berger’s interpretations of reproduced artwork were very interesting. However I don’t feel that original artworks are less special than they once were, or that they are reduced to simply the value of an “original.” Their message may be broadcasted through photo reproductions, but there is nothing as magical as being enveloped by artwork. Small photos cannot recreate the size and awesomeness of a painting, and the brush strokes, pencil lines, or any small artist touches are most certainly lost in a photograph (especially a black and white photo). Berger touches on this point too: “In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously” (26).

I disagree with him that paintings lose their authority through reproduction, and I do not feel that paintings become subverted or more accessible. Some paintings are reproduced often, but I have never felt terribly connected with a thumbnail of a reproduced painting. I can’t experience a painting through a slideshow or a book, and I think that many people feel the same. Reproduced paintings kind of slide through my memory, but I don’t relate to them or feel that I can truly experience them in a copied form. I think that many people learn about paintings or see them through advertisements, (as Berger mentions in essay 7) but I don’t think that they produce a lasting, true interpretation and memory that a real painting, drawing, or other artwork evokes.

Berger discusses art’s place in class quite often, and class distinctions have by no means disappeared. While I do believe that it’s true that “high art” has a more common place in the upper class, I think that today art is more universal than it has ever been. I don’t think that traditional art is necessarily more public- meaning the “great oil paintings” of classical Europe- but artwork and creativity are being spread throughout the public. Berger talks about how art was once a way to show what a person owned, to glorify their families, foods, riches, slaves, travels, and property. I think that it’s beautiful that art can now be considered in library books, sidewalk chalk, city murals, street performances, animation, and graffiti. There is still an “upper class” world of oil paintings and museum galleries, but art has become so much more than that, and incredibly more diverse.

Ways of Seeing has a bit of a disturbing view of women in artwork, and in general, and it made me feel uncomfortable. Essay 2 shows traditional and modern interpretations of the “nude,” which Berger goes on to discuss in essay 3. Berger has a very valid point when he discusses the traditional nude in paintings, and how the body language of nudes and their submissive expressions lend to: “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her” (50). Women in artwork have long been the “objects,” as they were in society. I think that Berger tries to be politically correct by saying that “according to the usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man” (45).

He attempts to make his following observations seem less sexist. Instead of simply discussing gender roles in paintings and their creation, Berger makes very sexist comments and uses the “authority” of paintings as examples for his ideas. I feel as though he contradicts his earlier denouncement of photo reproductions that use paintings as authority, for it is exactly how he attempts to convince the reader that “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). Berger uses several images on pages 50-58 to support this claim. It bothers me that before he even brings these paintings into account, he discusses women’s importance first. He makes the assumption that “to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men” (46). He doesn’t substantiate this statement with any painted “authority,” and I don’t feel like there is any reason to feel that women are men’s possessions with or without artistic support. I don’t even want to make allowances for Berger because of his “time:” he obviously knew that many people viewed women as equal to men because he tried to pacify them with his opening statements in essay 3. However, he discusses that man’s power and his power over women, but is no longer discussing art for the sake of art in that particular essay.