An interesting look at how we see things and how we are presented with ideas and images. Borrowed because my brother is doing a course and asked me to get it for him, it's quite a quick read but made me think about how things are presented. ( )

This specific volume is part of one of the best collections on visual arts I have ever seen. ( )

This book based on a BBC tv series approaches art appreciation from a post-modern point of view. Four chapters contain text, while three chapters are simply arrangements of artistic works meant to tell a story. Here's a summary of each chapter as a I see it:

1. Images and reproductions

2. Series of women in objectified positions (no text)

3. The woman's presence in art as something surveyed.

4. Evolution of common themes in art (no text)

5. Oil painting as representation of Western consumer culture

6. Images of living things as property (slaves, children, servants, animals, prostitutes)

7. The art of publicity

Berger is pompous and preachy about his point of view, but does make insightful observations. Another short book worth rereading and meditating upon at some juncture in the future.

"…publicity as a system only makes a single proposal.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.

This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer -- even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour." - p. 131 ( )

What you see is what you know - for good or ill

I must confess that I hated this book when studying at University. It seemed to be so trite and obvious, and the photo-essays were nauseatingly one-dimensional. So women's flesh is meat? Berger's ideas seem rather obvious today: that could be either a testament to his triteness or greatness, depending on how much you believe he changed folks' thinking himself, or just rode the changing times.

But perhaps he was the embodiment of new thinking in semiotics and mythology in the 60s, and he certainly has a really personable way of presenting the accompanying TV series. I prefer the obvious depth of thinking about signs and symbols and representations you get with anything by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin or Umberto Eco, to the unanswered questions and unclear meanings of the picture essays.

Big? Not at 166 sides
Clever? Certainly, but don't expect an academic tome - "Ways of Seeing" blurs a lot of lines: the one between cultural products and dispassionate enquiry key among them. ( )