Summary of

Ways Of Seeing
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Copyright © 2020 by Alma Duncan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form on by an electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
brief passages in a review.

Writed in the United States of America

2020
Falling Anvil Publishing
155 Mesa Street
Scottsdale, AZ 5862
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Table of Contents

OVERVIEW 3
CHAPTER SUMMARIES & ANALYSES 5
Chapter 1 5
Chapter 2 14
Chapter 3 15
Chapter 4 21
Chapter 5 22
Chapter 6 27
Chapter 7 28
KEY FIGURES 33
John Berger 33
THEMES 34
The Corrosive Ideology of Capitalism 34
The Entrenchment of the Common Person through the Manipulation of the Visual 34
Theory as Accessible and Promoting Critical Thinking and Positive Change 34
SYMBOLS & MOTIFS 36
Ways of Seeing 36
Mystification/De-Mystification 36
The Nude 36
Oil Painting 36
Publicity Images 37
IMPORTANT QUOTES 38
ESSAY TOPICS 47
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Overview
The book opens with Berger‘s take on Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.‖ Berger therefore establishes the Marxist bent of his work, particularly as he parses out the manner in which the
ruling class, and a class of scholars which essentially do its bidding, attach an artificial and untruthful aura to original
artworks. They do this as a bid to maintain their oppressive and morally-wrong socioeconomic status, and to renew and
maintain the fetishization of original works of art, which the proliferation of photographic reproduction threatens.

The rest of the book is spent analyzing three different genres of visual material: the nude (Chapter Three), oil painting (Chapter
Five), and ‗publicity images,‘ or advertisements (Chapter Seven). Berger‘s textual chapters alternate with chapters entirely
composed of reproductions of works of art or pieces of visual media, including reproductions of oil paintings, editorial
photography, and advertisements. Each chapter composed of reproductions seems to serve a thematic aim which matches either
the chapter that precedes or proceeds it.

In Chapter Three, Berger carefully elucidates the visual codes of the nude, using several oil paintings that demonstrate and
validate his argument. He judiciously distinguishes the nude, as an art form with its own distinct set of conventions, as entirely
different from the human experience of nakedness and lived sexuality. Instead, for him, the nude normalizes the sexist,
patriarchal reduction of female humans to the status of sex objects to be used and looked at by men. Through his analysis of the
genre‘s distinct set of conventions, including the mandate to render the naked female body completely free of hair, and the
occasional presence of a mirror within the picture frame, in order to condemn a woman for her so-called ‗vanity,‘ Berger
demonstrates the manner in which the visual language of the nude engenders a fundamentally-unequal way of seeing women.
In turn, this visual language indoctrinates both women and men—but especially women. Under the cultural conditions both
created by and responsible for the creation of the nude, the woman internalizes the male gaze and objectifies herself as a manner
of survival under patriarchy.

In Chapter Five, Berger undertakes a historicized analysis of the visual codes of oil painting. Charting the manner in which its rise
was contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism, Berger ultimately asserts that the central aim of oil painting was to depict the
philosophical system of capitalism. Within that philosophical system, the world and all within it is reduced to property and
commodity. Oil painting, commissioned by the ruling class, was thus tasked with the purpose of reflecting that class‘s power to
own and possess back to it. For Berger, this central aim was the reason for the development of both perspective and tangible
realism within the genre of oil painting.

In Chapter Seven, Berger expands on his articulation of the relationship between oil painting and capitalism in order to produce an
analysis of contemporary advertising images. For him, the visual codes of oil painting have reached their apotheosis within the
visual language of advertising. Both genres aim to entrench and normalize the philosophy of capitalism. There is, however, one
crucial difference between the two visual languages. Because oil painting was the province of the ruling class, it was primarily
tasked with affirming that class‘s position. The obsessive rendering of objects, and of aristocratic portraiture, was designed to
confirm the social and economic status that the ruling class indeed enjoyed. Advertising, however, is directed to the working
class. Therefore, it must produce an aspirational image geared toward a futurity that that class must be tempted to attain.
While both genres rely on depicting commodities and objects in hyper-realistic visual detail which importunes the sense of touch,
advertising articulates a distinct temporality and set of concerns that is meant to tantalize and hook those who do not yet (and
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perhaps never will) enjoy the status of the ruling class.

Ultimately, in each chapter, Berger is highly invested in deconstructing the normalized ways in which the average Western
subject is indoctrinated into a mindset which sanctions and duplicates the harmful, oversimplifying, and exploitative tenets of
sexism (in the case of Chapter Three) and capitalism (in the case of Chapters Five and Seven). He repeatedly invokes the primacy
of the visual in the human experience. He does this not only to communicate the great power of visual subliminal messaging, but
also to rally his readers into a more critical understanding of the visual world around them, and the manner in which harmful
ideologies are enshrined and mystified through the exploitation of the human capacity to see. Ultimately, he has hope that both
the primacy of the visual and the human ability to create visual language can be used to produce both resistance to pernicious
ideologies, and, perhaps, the creation of alternate ways in which humans can relate to themselves, each other, and the world at
large.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Summary

Berger‘s first argument in this chapter is that ―seeing comes before words‖ (7). In one sense, a child looks and sees before they can
speak. In another sense, ―seeing…establishes our place in the surrounding world‖ (7). Although we eventually grow to be able to
describe and explain our surrounding world using words, words will never supersede our visual experience of the world. Also,
words will never quite resolve or fully explain the visual phenomena that we experience—for example, although we use words to
logically explain a sunset, words can never fully account for our visual experience of a sunset. At this point, Berger refers to the
Surrealist painter René Magritte. He states that Magritte commented on this ―always-present gap between words and seeing in a
painting called The Key of Dreams‖ (7). The painting is reproduced in the text.

The way we see things is influenced by what we know or what we believe. In turn, our knowledge and beliefs are shaped by the
culture and society that surrounds us. For example, in the Middle Ages, when a belief in Hell was more widespread, the sight of fire
must have meant something different from what it means when we see fire today.
Conversely, the sight of fire—as a consuming flame that leaves ashes in its wake—influenced a medieval conception of hell, and also
influenced the medieval perception of the pain of burns. In another example, Berger points out that the sight of the one a person is
in love with has a ―completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love
can temporarily accommodate‖ (8).

Berger then asserts that 1) seeing comes before words, and 2) visual experience, which can never fully be explained by words, is not
merely ―mechanically reacting to stimuli‖ (8). If we were to consider seeing as only the mechanism of the eye‘s retina, then we could
consider it as wholly and merely mechanical. However, to look at something is an act of choice. This launches us into a territory
beyond solely the mechanical. Too, ―we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and
ourselves‖ (8). He asserts that our vision is perpetually active and mobile—it mentally constitutes our surroundings while
simultaneously confirming our own presence and ability to use our sensation of sight.
Berger also points out the reciprocal nature of vision. Soon after we begin to use our sense of sight, we become aware that we can
also be seen: ―If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen‖ (9). Too, he asserts
that this reciprocal nature of vision ―is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue‖ (9). Indeed, he asserts that spoken
dialogue is often an attempt to explain how each interlocutor ―sees things‖—either literally or metaphorically.

Berger then asserts that, in the context of this book, all images are man-made. He defines an image as ―a sight which has been
recreated or reproduced…an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it
first made its appearance and preserved—for a few moments or a few centuries‖ (9-10).

He points out that every image exemplifies a particular manner of seeing. Even photographs, which are often erroneously
regarded as purely mechanical records, embody an individual photographer‘s choice to select and frame one particular sight
and/or subject—out of an infinite number of possible sights and/or subjects. In a similar fashion,
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a painter‘s manner of seeing is duplicated by the marks he makes on a piece of canvas or paper. However, while every image
embodies its creator‘s manner of seeing, the perception or appreciation of an image also depends upon the spectator: an image
may contain twenty human subjects in it, but one spectator may only truly see one of those subjects.

Berger claims that images were first made to invoke the appearance of something that was absent. Gradually, it became
apparent that an image could outlast that which it represented, and that an image would then become a record of how
something once looked, or of how that thing was once seen by other people. Later, as a result of an increasing consciousness of
individuality, the image-maker became a part of the record, and an image came to be regarded as the record of one particular
image-maker‘s visual perception. Berger asserts that, while it would be folly to try to pinpoint this historical development with a
specific date, in Europe, the consciousness of the individual has existed since at least the beginning of the Renaissance.

Berger asserts that images are unlike any other kinds of relics or texts from the past because only images can offer ―such a direct
testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times‖ (10). He argues that, in this sense, images are more
precise and richer than literature. This is not to deny the expressive or imaginary quality of visual art or photographic art, nor to
say that visual art can be solely reduced to documentary evidence. On the contrary, he asserts that, the more imaginative a
work of visual art is, the more profound its testimony about both the world as it once was—and the artist‘s experience of the
visible—is.

At this point in the text, Berger lays out his extended definition of cultural mystification, as it relates to ways of seeing. Firstly,
Berger argues that, when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at and receive it is affected by a complex
system of learnt assumptions about art. These assumptions concern such issues as beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form,
status, and taste—among other things. As these assumptions change over time, they cannot be uniformly applied to a work of
visual art. Gradually, with the evolution of culture, these assumptions become out of line with the world as it is, and ―the
world as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness‖ (11).

Secondly, Berger asserts that, as these assumptions morph, they obscure the past: ―They mystify rather than clarify‖ (11). The past is
never a static, decontextualized, fully-preserved item, waiting to be discovered and understood, because the conception of history
always necessarily constitutes a relation between the present and the past.
Therefore, fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. When we mystify the past, historical works of art are made
unnecessarily remote, and we become less able to draw conclusions from the past in order to act.

Thirdly, Berger asserts that the dominant and commonly-accepted methods of looking at art promote a kind of mystification
that prevents many people from fully engaging with the historical context in which art is/was produced. He uses the act of looking
at an image of a landscape as an example. He asserts that when spectators look at an image of a landscape, they situate themselves
in it—as solely a visual phenomenon. However, if spectators instead situated themselves in history, they would come into a fuller
seeing of the image. Berger contends that the privileged minority of the ruling class creates cultural conditions that encourage
spectators to simply situate themselves
within the visual phenomena of works of art, rather than encouraging spectators to see themselves—and the works of art—within
surrounding historical contexts. He asserts that the ruling class creates these conditions of historical mystification in order to
retroactively justify their own role and render that role unimpeachable. In other words, Berger asserts that the ruling class
perpetuates a mode of looking at art that divorces works of art from their historical and cultural contexts in order to censor
any subversive class critique that may occur within any given work
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of art. He then asserts that this dominant mode of viewing art, created in order to insulate the ruling class from criticism
and promote that class‘s continued oppressive existence, no longer makes sense in modern times.

In order to illustrate his assertions regarding the historical mystification of images, Berger cites a two-volume study of the painter
Frans Hals, and undertakes a detailed case study which systematically critiques the book‘s author.
Firstly, he asserts that the book is no better and no worse than the average book of specialized art history. In so doing, he
asserts that the mystifying tendencies of the book‘s author are widespread.

Berger gives us some historical background on Hals. The last two of his great paintings depicted the Governors and the
Governesses of an Alms House for old paupers in the Dutch seventeenth-century city of Haarlem. These paintings were
officially commissioned. Hals, having spent most of his life in debt, was over eighty years old, and destitute, at the time of the
commissions. He began work on the two paintings during the winter of 1664, and was given three loads of peat on public
charity—without which he would have frozen to death. The subjects of his two paintings were the administrators (also called
Governors and Governesses) of the public charity who allotted the peat to him.

Berger then observes that the author of the art historical text records the historical facts surrounding the creation of the two
paintings, but then immediately dismisses them—stating instead that ―it would be incorrect to read into the paintings any
criticism of the [subjects]‖ (13). Berger observes that the author asserts that there is no evidence that Hals painted the Governors
and Governesses in a spirit of bitterness. Instead, in an act of mystification, the author asserts that each of the Governesses are
painted in a manner which depicts the human condition. Berger quotes the book‘s author at length, with his own italicizations for
emphasis: ―Each woman speaks to us of the human condition with equal importance. Each woman stands out with equal clarity
against the enormous dark surface, yet they are linked by a firm rhythmical arrangement and the subdued diagonal pattern
formed by their heads and hands. Subtle modulations of the deep, glowing blacks contribute to the harmonious fusion of the whole
and form an unforgettable contrast with the powerful whites and vivid flesh tones where the detached strokes reach a peak of
breadth and strength‖ (13).

Berger then strongly critiques the selected quote. While he concedes that an analysis of a painting‘s composition is reasonable and
legitimate, he takes issue with the way that the author regards the composition ―as though it were in itself the emotional charge
of the painting‖ (13). He points out that the phrases that he italicized in his citation ―transfer the emotion provoked by the
image from the plane of lived experience, to that of disinterested ‗art appreciation‘‖ (13). He asserts that this tunnel-vision
focus on solely composition is an act of mystification: it disappears conflict and posits the painting as merely a wondrously-
made object and a depiction of a static and decontextualized ―human condition,‖ rather than a historical and cultural artifact.

Berger then concedes that, while little is known about Hals or the Regents who commissioned him, the paintings themselves serve
as evidence of their relationship: they record the manner in which Hals saw the Regents. Berger‘s own analysis of the paintings thus
contrasts sharply with the author of the book about Hals, because Berger seeks to demystify the paintings, and invites the reader
to do so as well.

In the preliminary part of his analysis, he points out that the author of the book asserts that Hals seduces spectators into
―believing that [they] know the personality traits and even the habits of the men and women portrayed‖ (14).
Berger takes issue with this assertion. He contends that spectators are not merely ―seduced‖ by the painter‘s skill, and thus
invited into full understanding of the painting. Instead, he asserts that modern spectators can readily
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understand the paintings because they ―still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values‖, and that ―it is
precisely [that fact] which gives the paintings their psychological and social urgency‖—and not, as the book‘s author asserts,
Hals‘ skills as a ―seducer‖ (14).

Berger then observes that the book‘s author absolves Hals of any wrongdoing or subversive intent within the painting‘s
depiction of one Governor in particular, who appears in the painting with his hat on the side of his face and an expression that
many have understood to be a drunken one. Berger observes that the book‘s author asserts that any assertion that Hals depicted
the Regent in a drunken state is libelous. Berger then argues that, in so doing, the author is decisively evading a material analysis
of the social relations between the Regents and Hals—an analysis which would take the class differences between Hals and the
Regents, and the power that the Regents wielded over Hals, into account. Berger then contends that the real drama of the
paintings lies not in their composition nor in their use of darkness, but in the fact that Hals, a destitute old painter who had to live
off of the public charity that the Regents themselves administered, was forced to nevertheless try to render an objective portrait
of his oppressive benefactors.

Berger then asserts that mystification, as exemplified by the willful blind spots of the author‘s observations, ―is the process of
explaining away what might otherwise be evident‖ (15-16). In contrast to the book‘s author, who insists on limiting his
observations of Hals to pronouncements about the human condition and ―life‘s vital forces,‖ Berger then propounds that Hals
was ―the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism‖ (16). He then decries the book‘s
author‘s decision to focus solely on the human condition vis a vis Hals and his paintings as an act of deliberate mystification
which obscures the material and class relations between the Regents and Hals. `

Berger then admits that pseudo-Marxist mystification is just as possible as the elitist, class-blind mystification that he has just
pointed out in the book‘s author. He then moves on to examining the ―particular relation which now exists, so far as pictorial
images are concerned, between the present and the past‖ (16). He asserts that a careful viewer of art can ask the right
questions of art, rather than mystifying ones.

Berger then states that the art spectators of his day see the art of the past as no one saw it before—that they actually
perceive it in a wholly distinct way. He uses the concept of perspective to illustrate his point. The concept of perspective, unique to
European art and first established in the early Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of the spectator. Renaissance
conventions thus established the spectator as the arbiter of reality, the center of the visible world, and the vanishing point of
infinity. Berger asserts that this convention firmly established the spectator
—and thereby the human subject—as the center of the visual world and the figure for whom the visual world arranges itself, ―as the
universe was once thought to be arranged for God‖ (16). Berger then points out that, according to the schema that this concept of
perspective erects, there is no visual reciprocity: ―There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he himself is
the situation‖ (16). However, he contends that this condition laid the groundwork for an inherent contradiction within the
concept of perspective, because it ―structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be
in one place at a time‖ (16). In Berger‘s estimation, this concept of perspective is thus flawed by the simple fact that reality
contains multitudes and cannot be reduced to one human‘s singular vantage point.

He then claims that the advent of photography laid this contradiction bare. Berger cites a quote from Dziga Vertov, the
revolutionary Soviet film director, in order to emphasize his contention that photography isolated and depicted momentary
appearances—which were liable and likely to change at any given moment—and thus destroyed the idea
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that images were timeless. Because photographs record and depict the photographer‘s position in relation to both his or her
subjects, and the photographer‘s momentary and changeable position in time and space, it is no longer possible to imagine
everything converging on the human eye, and no longer possible to conceptualize the human spectator as the center of the
universe—as the concept of perspective once purported. Therefore, Berger asserts that photography revolutionized the act of
seeing, and made the idea of the visible mean something completely different than what it previously meant.

Berger asserts that the Impressionists immediately understood and seized upon this revolution in our perceptions of the visible.
Operating from the perception that the visual world does not, in fact, arrange itself to man in order to be seen, the Impressionists
thus regarded the visual, in continual flux, as fugitive. For the Cubists, the visual was no longer understood as the organized and
ordered perception of a single eye, but as ―the totality of possible views taken from points all round the object (or person) being
depicted‖ (18). Berger cites a reproduction of Picasso‘s 1881 ―Still Life with Wicker Chair‖ as an illustration of the
Impressionists‘ revolutionized manner of seeing.

The book also proclaims that the camera fundamentally changed the way in which spectators perceive paintings, including
paintings that were created long before the camera was invented. Prior to the invention of the camera, paintings were singular
works of art—not readily reproduced. They were also often specifically designed to be integrated into the design and
architecture of singular and highly-particular buildings. For example, many paintings within early Renaissance churches or
chapels functioned as records of the building‘s interior life, and thus were inexorably linked to the particularities of the specific
sites in which they hung. While some paintings were transportable, paintings could never be seen in two places at the same time,
and were thus intractably moored to their surroundings. This circumstance predicated their meaning on their singularity as
objects, within their particular contexts. Berger asserts that photography‘s power to duplicate a painting disrupted the singularity
of paintings and in turn disturbed this once-intractable relationship between a painting‘s meaning and the place in which it is
housed. Photography, in its ability to reproduce a painting, thus destroys the unique singularity of paintings, and also
multiplies and fragments a painting‘s possible meaning, making that meaning plural rather than singular. Berger uses the
appearance of a painting on television to exemplify this process of fragmentation. He points out that, when a painting is
broadcast on television, it enters countless homes and thus becomes a part of multitudes of different visual and psychological
contexts. Because of this fact, that single painting is seen in multiple different contexts, simultaneously. The camera thus allows
the painting to travel to the spectator, rather than vice versa. Before art was reproducible, a painting was understood as a
singular object with a particular context—and its meaning was inexorably linked to those two facts. Due to the advent of
photography and television, the process of extracting meaning from a singular painting and its specific contexts was forever
fragmented—meaning that original paintings no longer produce meaning in the way that they once did.

Berger then recites the counterpoint that, because all reproductions distort the original, the original painting is still unique, in a
sense. He provides a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci‘s Virgin on the Rocks on page 20 of his book, and uses it as a case study in
this phenomenon. He states that the reader, having seen the reproduction of the painting, can then go to the National Gallery to
look at the original—and to detect the defects of the reproduction. A reader/spectator could alternately forget about the
particular reproduction that the book provides altogether, and merely be reminded that they have seen a reproduction of the
famous painting somewhere or other. Berger asserts, though, that in either case, the uniqueness of the original painting now lies in it
being the original of a reproduction. Due to the ubiquity and omnipresence of reproductions, a painting is no longer unique in
and of itself, and its meaning does not fundamentally draw primarily from its existence as a unique object. Instead, in the
age of mechanical reproduction, a painting‘s primary meaning is drawn not from its message as a singular and singly-
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contextualized object, but from its status as a reproduced and reproducible image.

Berger asserts that the new status of original works is a perfectly logical outcome of the proliferation of mechanical
reproduction. However, this new status also lays the groundwork for a new kind of mystification. As detailed earlier, under these
new circumstances, the meaning of an original work of art lies not in what it uniquely says—as a specific painting in a
specific place, for example—but in what it uniquely is: the original of a reproduction.
Consequently, in the age of reproduction, an original work of art is evaluated and defined as an object whose value depends on its
rarity. This value is then affirmed and measured by the price that an original can fetch on the market. And, due to the lofty
presumptions that our culture attributes to works of art, an original artwork‘s market value is regarded as an indicator of its
spiritual value. This cultural concept of the spiritual value of an original art object is the product of a bogus, grandiloquent
religiosity that is more characteristic of medieval lore than of the secular modern age. He then laments that, under this
anachronistic and mystifying schema, works of art are presented and discussed as if they are holy relics. Every part of their
fabrication is studied as a means of both proving their survival as unique objects genuine, and of certifying their status as
original objects.

Berger then circles back to The Virgin on the Rocks. He asserts that, when a spectator goes to view the painting at the National
Gallery, he or she will have been encouraged by the culture surrounding art spectatorship to see and appreciate the painting as a
unique original. He or she will be encouraged to assign a religious importance to the original painting, and to try to feel its
authenticity—and to therefore see the painting as beautiful because of its authenticity. Furthermore, he asserts that the
pressure on spectators to enact this narrative is far from naïve—it is indeed encouraged by ―the sophisticated culture of art
experts for whom the National Gallery catalogue is written‖ (22). He then intimates that the catalogue‘s entry on The Virgin of
the Rocks is one of its longest entries. The entry does not deal with the meaning of the image. Instead, it documents the details of
its commission, its attendant legal squabbles, and its shifts in ownership. Berger asserts that the entry delves into all of this
information in order to do two things: 1) to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the painting is an original Da Vinci, and 2) to
prove that an almost identical painting, housed at the Louvre, is a reproduction of the one that hangs in the National Gallery.

Berger then moves onto another example of the fraudulent religiosity that surrounds original works of art: Da Vinci‘s cartoon
panels entitled, ―The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist.‖ A few years prior to his writing, the work was
known only to scholars. However, because an American wanted to buy it for two-and-a-half million pounds, the painting now
hangs in a room by itself, enclosed in bullet-proof Perspex, and the National Gallery sells more reproductions of it than any other
picture in its collection. He asserts that, because of the way that market value is inexorably and lamentably tied to our
perceptions of the spiritual value of works of art, this artwork is now illogically venerated—not because of anything particularly
special or meaningful in its message, but because of its market value.

The book then argues that the fraudulent religiosity—predicated upon market value—that now surrounds original works of art
serves as a substitute for what original paintings lost when they became reproducible. This religiosity is a function of nostalgia,
and ―it is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique
and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so‖ (23).

The book then provides two tables sourced from L‟Amour de l‟Art, published in 1969 and written by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain
Darbel. The first table measures the national proportion of art museum visitors according to level of education in four
countries: Greece, Poland, France, and Holland. Berger points out that the table supports the assertion that an interest in art
is directly correlated to a privileged education.
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The second table relays the results of a poll, broken down by the professions of the poll-takers—including manual workers, skilled
and white-collar workers, and professional and upper managerial workers. In the poll, the participants were asked to choose the
location (for example: a church, a library, or a department store) of which a museum most reminded them. From this table, Berger
draws the conclusion that the majority of people regard museums as the repositories of holy relics—across all vocational categories,
museums remind people of a church at the highest rate. He also extrapolates that this data point illustrates a common belief that
original masterpieces ―belong to the preserve (both materially and spiritually) of the rich‖ (24). He furthermore contends that
this perception works in tandem with the perception that original works of art are holy relics: instead of their holiness deriving
from formal religions, it derives from ―the mystery of unaccountable wealth‖ (24).

When works of art become reproducible, the meaning of paintings no longer depends on the original work. Their meaning
becomes transmittable. In direct contravention of the magical, mystifying thinking that characterizes what he views as
purposefully popularized notions about the original work of art, Berger asserts that this meaning is merely information, not holy
or magical knowledge. Furthermore, in contrast to a conservatism which might argue that an original work of art deserves
veneration evocative of religion, Berger argues that the new and multiple meanings that a work of art acquires upon its
reproduction are simply a natural outcome of its reproducibility. He asserts that we should not evaluate duplicates of works of
art solely on the grounds of whether they reproduce the original adequately. Instead, we should attend to the many different and
legitimate purposes that reproductions have come to serve.

One example of these new purposes is the fact that a cropped reproduction can bring new meaning to a painting—a lone girl in an
allegorical painting, isolated through cropping, can become the subject of a portrait rather than an actor in a narrative.
Secondly, a painting reproduced through the time-based medium of film inevitably becomes swallowed into the meaning-system
of the film, and no longer functions as only a painting, whose elements are not dependent upon time. Thirdly, paintings are often
reproduced with words around them, which may fundamentally alter the way they are perceived. Finally, Berger argues that his
volume itself makes use of reproduced paintings and that, consequentially, they have each become embroiled in an argument
that has little to nothing to do with their original meaning.

Berger then asserts that the ability to reproduce art technically means that works of art can be used by anybody. However, he
states that the present uses of art reproductions—as they appear in art books, magazines, films, or within golden frames in
livingrooms—bolster the rarified and classist reputation of fine art. He argues that this unchanged use of art (and
reproductions of original works of art) support the oppressive notion that art has a unique and undiminished authority. He argues
that this oppressive notion is, in turn, used to make ―inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling‖ (29). In short, the
veneration of the original work of art, which persists even in the age of mechanical reproduction, is a machination of the ruling
commercial and political classes that keeps the hierarchies of the undemocratic societies of the past alive.

Although these machinations often cleverly and malevolently disguise or deny the many possibilities engendered by the ability to
reproduce art, sometimes individuals can subvert the dominant modes of art spectatorship. As one example of this, Berger
invokes the fact that adults and children sometimes have boards in their living spaces on which they pin pieces of paper. On these
boards, letters, snapshots, and newspaper clippings are displayed next to reproduced images of artworks. He argues that these
boards are a highly-democratizing endeavor and should logically replace museums.
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By making the above argument, Berger is not stating that original works of art have become wholly useless. He does concede that
original paintings have the power to close the ―distance in time between the painting of the picture and one‘s own act of looking at
it‖, because when a spectator looks at the strokes of paint on a painting, they can follow the gestures of the painter (31). Thus, the
painter‘s historical moment is literally there, before a spectator‘s eyes.
However, Berger asserts that the spectator‘s conceptions of that painted moment depend upon their expectations of art, which in
turn depends upon how that spectator has already encountered the meaning of that painting, and others, through
reproductions. Here, Berger again qualifies his argument. He is not asserting that all art can be understood spontaneously.
For example, a magazine cut-out of a reproduced image of an archaic Greek head cannot solely be evaluated on the personal basis
that any random person may assign to it. To pin it on an image board does not mean that one is reckoning with a full, ultimate, or
absolute meaning of that head.

At this point in the text, Berger gives some key clarifications to his position. He argues that the opposing forces that are at stake in
this debate about the meaning of art are neither innocence and knowledge, nor the natural and the cultural. Instead, for Berger,
the central conflict is between ―a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric
approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline‖ (32). He furthermore asserts
that this ruling class is not in danger of being eradicated by the proletariat, but by the new power of the corporation and the state.
For Berger, the most pressing questions of today‘s age are: ―to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To
those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?‖ (32).

Berger then states that the visual arts have always existed within a removed domain. Originally, this domain was simultaneously
magical, sacred, and physical: this domain was the literal physical location for which art was made. He argues that the viewing of
art was once ritualistic and set apart from normal life, and that later, the domain of art became a social one. It entered the culture
of the ruling class and remained physically set apart, as it was housed in their palaces and houses. Thus, throughout this history,
art derived its authority from its removal and isolation from everyday life. The modern convention of reproducibility destroyed
this artificial authority and removed art from its isolated and rarefied domain. Because of the new ability to cheaply and easily
produce reproductions, ―images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, [and] free‖ (32).
No longer housed within rarefied domains accessible only to the ruling classes, art has thus entered the mainstream, and pervades
everyday life in the same manner that language itself does.

However, very few people are aware of the profound changes that reproduction ushered in, because the means of reproduction
are used to promote the illusion that nothing has changed and that reproduction, rather than democratizing access to art and
sowing revolutionary potential, merely allows the masses to appreciate art as the cultured few once did. Berger concedes that,
understandably, many people continue to remain skeptical of fine art for this reason. However, he asserts that, if the new language
of images that reproduction has inaugurated were freed from this oppressive conceit, it would engender a new kind of power.
If people were awakened to the new possibilities that reproduction affords, they could begin to use images to define their
experiences in areas where words are inadequate. Here, he invokes an assertion that he made at the outset of the chapter: ―seeing
comes before words‖ (33). In so doing, he asserts that this nascent new visual (versus linguistic) way of defining experiences—both
personal and historical—could revolutionize the way that humans conceive our relation to the past. To Berger, this conception is
synonymous with the experience of giving meaning to our lives, ―of trying to understand the history of which we can become the
active agents‖ (33).
 13

Here, at the end of the chapter, Berger cogently and concisely states his central arguments. He asserts that, because of the ubiquity
and power of reproduction, ―The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of
images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose‖ (33). He then states that naming this new language
inevitably calls forth the question of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, and the policies of
public art galleries and museums. For Berger, however, these narrowly professional concerns pale in comparison to the much
larger issue: the fact that reproduction lays bare the fact that ―a people or class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to
choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history‖ (33). For him, this central fact is the
reason why the entirety of art history has become a political issue.

Berger closes the chapter with a note that many of the chapter‘s ideas have been taken from Walter Benjamin‘s essay entitled
―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‖, which was published more than forty years prior to Ways of Seeing.

Chapter 1 Analysis

In this chapter, Berger riffs on Walter Benjamin‘s seminal text ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‖
but adds a crucial element that differentiates his arguments from Benjamin‘s. Namely, he argues for the primacy of the visual in
the human experience. He therefore both inflects Benjamin‘s Marxist critique with his own particular framework, which
concerns itself not only with the role of the physical artwork in capitalist society, but boldly asserts that capitalist society produces
specific visual languages through the use and proliferation of ideology embedded in 1) images themselves, and 2) the ways in
which art discourse is produced and disseminated throughout Western capitalist culture. In Berger‘s view, through both this
embedded ideology and an exploitation of the cognitive fact that visual images have more immediate and lasting power than any
other mode of communication or representation, capitalist society is able to both endlessly replicate and simultaneously obscure its
own pernicious ideology as a means of psychological and material domination. This set of arguments is the primary
theoretical conceit of Ways of Seeing.

Chapter One focuses mainly on the issue of art discourse and its dissemination, asserting that the rarified art discourse
produced by an almost clerical class of elite art scholars purposefully mystifies the idea of the original work of art, in the face of
new technologies which, in their ability to easily and cheaply duplicate original works of art, would endanger the honorific and
inaccessible status that original works of art enjoyed in past eras ,during which easy and cheap reproduction was not possible. In
Berger‘s estimation, it is that status that allowed the ruling class to claim and exercise a monopoly on art, and it is through the
mystification of the original work of art, in the contemporary age of mechanical reproduction, that enables that monopoly to
continue.

Berger‘s writing is remarkable for its refusal to use highly-specialized Marxist jargon, while still substantially and precisely
articulating a scathing critique of capitalist society and developing nuanced points which both speak directly to laypersons and
add new dimension to a generalized Marxist critique of capitalism. Specifically, his focus on the languages and codes through
which the visual are interpreted distinguish his argument from one that would narrowly focus on material conditions. His
theories thereby form a bridge between the economic/material concerns of textbook Marxism, and cultural studies or art
history.

Although the liveliness of his prose communicates a depth of passion and a lucid investment in his own ideas as well as those of his
progenitors, he manages to communicate complex ideas in a conversational, accessible manner that
 14

markedly differentiates itself from the highly technical—indeed oftentimes almost esoteric—verbiage that characterizes
many Marxist primary sources. Indeed, Berger‘s tendency to use a light touch with his language is undoubtedly linked to his
endeavor to demystify both the notion of the original work of art itself, and the highly academic discourse which persists, like an
impermeable magical aura, around those artworks. Therefore, not only does the content of his work form many bridges, its
form does as well.

Ultimately, this chapter is an invitation: an invitation to deconstruct the pervasive and oppressive norms of both contemporary
art discourse and art history, and an invitation for all people to harvest the potentiality of the new visual language that the
ability to reproduce art and the mediums of both photography and television have created. Through a repeated assertion of the
primacy of the visual in the human experience, he laments the quashed development of a potentially revolutionary visual
language, which, if allowed to prosper, could hold the power to articulate and understand the human experience in a manner
which written and spoken language cannot. Through his citation of data sets from L‟Amour de l‟Art, he cogently asserts both his
own knowledge of the fact that an elitist ideology persists in attaching itself to the exhibition of art and the discourse that
surrounds it and also ingratiates himself to any readers who may be reticent to engage in art discourse. This, too, is a bid to both
free and demystify art and its potential from the oppressive grips of the ruling class.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Summary

This chapter is composed entirely of uncited reproduced images: paintings, photographs, and sculptures. Most of the images are
of women. The photographs range in style and purpose. Some appear to be soft-core porn, some are documentary-style, and
some are advertisements. The reproduced images also cover a wide range of historical periods, appearing to range from
Renaissance, to early modern, to contemporary. One page also has what appear to be contemporary editorial photographs of
food.

Chapter 2 Analysis

Here, Berger indulges a somewhat puzzling penchant for reproducing artwork, advertisements, and photography without
citations, and without any written contextualization. Perhaps, by openly flouting academic conventions, he means to render
these artworks more accessible. Another possible interpretation of this style of presentation (in which written language is
totally absent) is that he means to foreground his reader‘s inherent facility with visual languages. For Berger, this facility is
inherent because of his audience‘s presumed status as a subject of Western capitalism, and the primacy of the visual as an
arbiter of both ideology and articulation.

In function, this collection of images of women, from a myriad of historical periods, primes his audience for the proceeding
chapter‘s content, and also activates the almost subliminal gender ideology and messaging that he will explore in that chapter.
Tellingly, this chapter contains one image of food—the sole image in the chapter that does not depict the likeness of a woman.
Through the inclusion of this image, Berger craftily hints at a number of provocations, such as: What commonalities do images
of food and images of women have in common? Does art set a precedent for and/or indulge the sexist practice of dehumanizing women
and reducing them to objects for consumption? What are the visual codes that govern our understanding of the human and the object,
and what do these codes have to do with the depiction of women? Through his inclusion of a variety of artistic styles and
advertising/editorial/pornographic images that are not traditionally seen as ‗high‘ art, he implicitly entreaties the
 15

reader to think about the common ideology which might bridge these differing types of images.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 Summary

This chapter begins with a reproduction of Felix Trutat‘s (1824-1848) ―Reclining Bacchante.‖ In it, a naked woman, her body
well-lit, reclines. Her vagina is covered by a draped piece of cloth, and her face is turned to meet the spectator‘s gaze. In the
upper right-hand corner, a man sticks his face, which is veiled in shadow, through a window to gaze upon her.

Berger asserts that, according to long-held conventions that are only now being questioned, although still not surpassed,
―the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man‖ (45). A man‘s presence depends upon the promise of
power that he embodies. If a man is perceived to possess a great amount of credible power, his presence is striking. If a man is
perceived to lack credibility and power, he is said to have a weak presence. Berger continues: ―The promised power may be
moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object is always exterior to the man. A man‘s presence
suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you‖ (45). He concedes that the presence a man exerts may be fabricated: he
may feign competences that he does not actually possess. However, his presence is always predicated upon the power that he
exercises over others.

Berger then argues that, in contrast, ―a woman‘s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot
be done to her‖ (46). He contends that a woman‘s presence asserts itself in everything that she does: ―her gestures, voice, opinions,
expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste. Indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence‖
(46). A woman‘s presence is intrinsic to her being.

Berger then proclaims that ―to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of
men‖ (46). He asserts that the social presence of women has developed as a consequence of their ingenuity within the
confines that men have placed on them. However, this presence has also come at ―the cost of a woman‘s self being split in two‖
(46). Due to the fact that she is always watched by men, a woman instinctually watches herself. In everything that she does, she
not only acts, but also always simultaneously conjures an image of herself acting. Her consciousness is consequently split between
being a self and being the object of a male gaze.
Within her mind‘s eye she carries both herself as a surveyed object, and the notion of the surveyor himself. Her identity as a
woman always carries these dual elements. Women are acutely aware that their appearances to men are crucially important
barometers for their success in life. Consequently, her own sense of self is always ―supplanted by a sense of being
appreciated as herself by another‖ (46).

Conversely, the conclusions of a man‘s surveillance of a woman determines how he will treat that woman. As a consequence, the
way that a woman appears before man will determine how men treat her. Berger maintains that, in order for women to gain some
control over this process, they must contain and internalize this social structure. The part of a woman‘s consciousness which is the
surveyor treats the part which is surveyed in the same manner that she wishes to be treated by others. For Berger, the way a
woman treats herself, in order to provide an example to others of how she would like to be treated, constitutes her presence.
Consequentially, a woman can never act from a place of whole, undisturbed, and autonomous subjectivity. All of her actions
are filtered through a gaze which interprets those actions as an indicator of both how she feels about herself, and how men
should treat her. Only men can act from a place of autonomous subjectivity, without their actions being filtered through a gaze
which is
 16

corollary to the one by which women feel ceaselessly impinged upon.

In other words, ―men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at‖ (47). This
fundamental gender economy determines not only how men and women interact, but how women relate to themselves. The
surveyor that a woman carries around in her dual consciousness is a man, while she herself remains a woman. Here, Berger directly
relates this discussion of gender to the larger concerns of his book, stating that the ultimate consequence of a woman‘s split
consciousness is that she ―turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight‖ (47).

He tells us that women are the ever-recurring subject of one particular European oil-painting category: the nude. Through the
nudes of European paintings, we can discover some of the criteria and conventions used both to see women, and to judge them as
sights. He then quotes the story of Adam and Eve, as told in the book of Genesis, and remarks on two of the stories most striking
elements. For one, Adam and Eve only conceived of their nudity as illicit nakedness after eating the apple. Nakedness as sin was
thus a construction, invented by the eye of the beholder.
Secondly, Eve—the woman—is blamed and punished by being made subordinate to Adam, the man: ―In relation to the woman, the
man becomes the agent of God‖ (48).

Medieval conventions often illustrated the story of Adam and Eve in successive panels, as in a strip cartoon. During the
Renaissance, this narrative convention disappeared, in favor of depictions of the singular moment of shame.
Berger notes that, in many of these Renaissance paintings, the couple wears fig leaves to mitigate their nakedness, and their
expressions of shame are not for the benefit of one another, but for the spectator. He cites an early sixteenth-century
painting of the couple in order to exemplify this notion. He notes that, later, depictions of Adam and Eve morph into depictions of
their shame as a kind of display. To exemplify this, he provides a reproduction of ―The Couple‖ by Max Slevogt (1868-1932), as
well as an underwear advertisement that was contemporary to his time.

He remarks that the advent of secular painting opened up the nude as a more widespread phenomenon. However, in all of them,
the subject (a woman) is always depicted as someone who is conscious that they are under a gaze: ―She is not naked as she is. She is
naked as the spectator sees her‖ (50). As an example, he offers two different paintings of Susannah and the Elders. In one, the
explicit theme of the painting is a naked woman being surveilled: the viewers join the Elders in spying on her. In the second,
Susannah looks at herself in a mirror, joining the spectators in gazing at herself.

Berger then illuminates the fact that the mirror was often used within paintings to symbolize the vanity of the nude woman. He
points out that this moralizing was hypocritical: A woman is painted nude for the pleasure of the spectator, but a mirror is
put in her hand and the painting is titled ―Vanity‖ in order to condemn her. She cannot partake in any of the pleasure that her
likeness generates without being lambasted as vain. However, in his opinion, the ultimate function of the mirror was to
convince women to treat themselves as sights.

In another example of female sexual objectification, paintings of The Judgment of Paris, (which in contemporary parlance is
now known as a beauty contest), are presented to the viewer, and women are pitted against each other in the process of their
shared sexual objectification. (Two examples of this kind of painting are re-printed in the book.)

Charles the Second‘s commissioned painting of his mistress Nell Gwynne, which is also re-printed in the book, could easily be
conventionally construed as a portrait of Venus and Cupid—with the naked woman passively looking at the spectator—but in
actuality her nakedness is a sign of her submission to the king. Both the painting and the woman
 17

are objects that belong to him, and the painting, displayed before his guests, instantiates the woman as an owned object to be
coveted by his guests.

Here, Berger contrasts these Western conventions regarding the depictions of naked women against the non- European
traditions of Indian art, Persian art, African art, and pre-Columbian art. In those traditions, the nakedness of women is never so
plainly submissive, and more likely to be depicted as a part of an active and reciprocal expression of sexual love between two
people.

Berger then arrives at an important distinction by citing Kenneth Clark‘s book The Nude. In it, Clark remarks that to be naked is
simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art. The nude is a genre unconfined to fine art, with its own specific
conventions that nonetheless derive from a certain tradition of Western art.

He then states that, in order to fully investigate the conventions of the nude, we must not only look at it in terms of art, but in
terms of lived sexuality. He then explicates the distinction between nakedness and the nude even further. In his estimation, to be
naked is to be oneself, while to be nude is ―to be seen as naked by others and not recognized for oneself‖ (54). A naked body must
be objectified in order to transform into a nude, and the sight of that body stimulates its use as an object. Nakedness reveals itself
while ―nudity is placed on display‖ (54). To be naked is to remove artifice, but to be exhibited as a nude is to have one‘s body
transformed into artifice. Therefore, ―nudity is a form of dress‖ (54).

According to the European conventions of the nude, the spectator is presumed and assumed to be a fully-clothed male. He is the
actual protagonist of the painting, who is also curiously never actually painted. Everything within the painting addresses him
and exists for him.

In order to exemplify the above concept, Berger offers a case study of the painting called Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love, by
Bronzino (1503-1572). He calls it, first and foremost, a painting of sexual provocation. The painting was sent as a present from the
Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France. The pretense of the painting is a depiction of Cupid kissing Venus, but the way the
woman‘s body is arranged in the picture plane has nothing to do with their kiss. Instead, with her body explicitly on display, it
becomes a visual delight designed to appeal to the king‘s sexuality while simultaneously negating hers. Berger furthermore notes
that the presence of hair on the body conventionally signifies sexual power and passion. The consequent absence of bodily hair
in conventional female nudes contravenes feminine sexual agency and grants the clothed male spectator a monopoly on sexual
passion.

He then compares the female nude figure depicted in La Grande Odalisque by Ingres (1780-1867) to a woman depicted in a
contemporary ―girlie magazine,‖ noting the striking similarities in the two women‘s expressions. In each, the woman gazes at the
spectator, presumed to be male, with contrived charm—offering herself up as a sight to be surveyed.

Berger then concedes that, sometimes, a painting does include a male lover. However, he quickly notes that the depicted
woman‘s attention is very rarely on that male lover. Instead, she often looks away from him or out of the painting ―towards the
one who considers himself her true lover—the spectator-owner‖ (56). He reveals that there was a special category of pornographic
paintings, especially prolific in the eighteenth century, which featured couples in the act of making love. However, these paintings
made it clear that the spectator-owner would in fantasy expel the other man, or, alternately, identify with him. He contrasts this
convention against non-European tradition, which ―provokes the notion of many couples making love‖ (56).
 18

He remarks that almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is either literally or metaphorically frontal, and frames
the sexual protagonist as the un-painted spectator and/or owner looking at and consuming the prostrate naked female form(s).
For Berger, the absurdity of this male flattery reached its apotheosis in the public art of the nineteenth century. He provides a
re-printing of Les Oréades by Bouguereau (1825-1905), to exemplify this convention. In it, a veritable cloud of dozens of naked,
supine women floats in the air as three men, with backs turned to the spectator, watch them. He asserts that, while men of state and
of business conducted their affairs under such paintings, they might look to the paintings if they ever found themselves bested. The
images and ideology contained within such paintings would reaffirm their power and identity as men as a form of consolation.

In order to further develop his distinction between nakedness and the nude, Berger here introduces the fact that there are a few
notable exceptions to the European tradition of the nude: ―paintings of loved women, more or less naked‖ (57). He notes that, in
these exceptions, ―the painter‘s personal vision of the particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for
the spectator‖ (57). The spectator can witness the relationship between the painter and the painted, but can do no more than that,
as a consummate outsider. Due to the manner in which the painter includes his subject‘s sexual agency within the very structure of
the image, and the very expressions upon the woman‘s face, the spectator cannot imagine himself as the person for whom she is
naked. He therefore cannot transform her into a nude.

Berger here resists the urge to pit these exceptional paintings against traditional nudes in a simple nude/nakedness dichotomy. In
order to do so, he expounds upon the sexual function of nakedness in lived reality. He remarks that the process of looking upon a
naked lover is a consummately ordinary and marvelously simple one, which, crucially, provokes a very strong sense of relief. He
posits that, due to the urgency and complexity of our feelings, we are prone to imagine a lover as mysterious and unique. The
removal of clothes, however, relieves us, because it confirms that our lover is more like the rest of their sex than they are different.
This kind of nakedness is therefore perceived as warm and friendly.

He also notes that the sight of a naked lover introduces a sense of banality that contravenes the sense of mystery that attends
sexual desire. Our gaze shifts from the bits of the body left revealed by clothing to those anatomical parts normally covered by
clothes. In so doing, our gaze confirms the manner in which the lover‘s body conforms to the expected anatomy of their sex. They
therefore become more of an ordinary body than an anxiety-producing mystery. He remarks that this highly ordinary process,
―by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers, at the same time, the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex‖
(59). The loss of the mystery of the singular lover produces the possibility for shared mystery through the shared subjectivity of
the sexual act.

From these propositions, Berger derives the conclusion that it is extremely difficult to produce a static image of sexual
nakedness (as opposed to nudity). For him, nakedness is a process, rather than a singular state. A single image, therefore,
cannot serve as a bridge between two subjective, imaginative states that is any way close to the process of sexual congress. If
this image isolates a single moment within the sexual encounter, it will produce a chilling effect.

However, Berger then offers up to us an example of a painting that, exceptionally, successfully depicts the nakedness of which he
speaks: Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat, by Rubens (1517-1640). Berger observes that, in this painting, we see Helene in the act of
turning, with her fur coat about to fall from her shoulders. She will not remain as she is for more than a second. The painting thus
contains time and the experience of the process of nakedness: It is easy to
 19

imagine the moments prior to the painted moment, in which she was totally naked. She can belong to several different
moments simultaneously.

He asserts that Helene‘s body confronts the viewer not as an objectified sight but as an experience. He believes this for several
reasons. For starters, her tousled hair, the expression of her eyes, and the tenderness with which her skin is painted point toward
Rubens‘ experience. However, the more profound reason is a formal one. The way that her body is painted is anatomically
impossible, which permits her body to become inconceivably dynamic: ―Its coherence is no longer within itself but within the
experience of the painter‖ (61). More specifically, this visual element, whose intentionality or lack thereof is immaterial to
Berger, allows the upper and lower halves of the woman to rotate separately, and in opposite directions. Simultaneously, her
sexual center is hidden by the dark fur coat and ensconced within the dark background of the picture plane. She thereby turns
both around and within ―the dark which has been made a metaphor for her sex‖ (61).

Berger then reveals a second condition that must be met in order for a painting to qualify as a depiction of nakedness,
rather than a nude: an ―element of banality which must be undisguised but not chilling‖ (61). For Berger, this quality
distinguishes the lover from the voyeur. In the Rubens painting, Berger finds this quality in the ―compulsive‖ mode in
which Rubens paints the fat softness of Helene‘s flesh: a mode which persistently breaks every convention dictating the
idealized depiction of flesh and thereby presents the woman‘s extraordinary specificity.

Berger then posits that the nude in European oil painting is usually understood as an admirable expression of the European
humanist spirit. He notes that this spirit was inexorably linked to the development of individualism as an explicit philosophical
tradition. However, he notes that the tradition itself contained an inherent contradiction which it itself could not resolve: ―on the
one hand the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of
their activities—the woman—treated as a thing or an abstraction‖ (62). For example, Durer believed that the ideal nude should
be constructed by compositing discrete body parts from different bodies. He believed that this ideal would glorify Man.
However, his proposed process displayed total indifference to who any one person actually was.

Berger then arrives at a key point of the chapter. This inherent contradiction within the tradition of European oil painting
reveals that, while the nude purports to exult the individual, its entrenched conventions systematically objectified and
therefore contravened the individuality and subjectivity of women. Furthermore, he asserts that this inequality is so deeply lodged
within our culture that it continues to shape the consciousness of many women, who watch and surveil themselves and their own
femininity as an extension of the male gaze which they feel is upon them at all times.

In modern art, the status of the nude is not as prominent as it once was. Too, artists such as Manet, whose famously subversive
―Olympia‖ challenged the popular conventions, questioned the vaunted principles of the nude. He remarks that, due to this challenge,
the nude was replaced by the ―realism‖ of depictions of the prostitute, who became the hallmark woman of early avant-garde
twentieth-century painting, while the tradition of the nude persisted in academic painting.

Berger observes that the ideology that formed the basis of the tradition of the nude are today expressed through more widely
circulated media: advertising, journalism, and television. Through these mediums, certain aspects fundamental to the viewing of
women persist. Images of women, designed to be viewed by men, still serve the same
 20

objectifying and dehumanizing purpose. In order to prove himself correct, Berger then invites the reader to select a traditional
nude that depicts a woman, and then to mentally change that woman into a man through either imagination or drawing.
He invites the reader to note the acute disturbance within assumptions of a likely viewer that such a transformation would
produce.

Chapter 3 Analysis

In this chapter, Berger does not say anything that feminist scholars whose work precedes him did not already say. His meditations
on the male gaze and the objectification of women will be very familiar to even the casual scholar of feminism. However, in a very
similar manner to Chapter One, the distinguishing feature of his theoretical focus in this chapter is its sustained focus on the
connection between a feminist critique and a sharp focus on the visual as both language, and as arbiter of ideology. While the
focus of Chapter One was a critique of capitalist ideology at large, Chapter Two‘s focus is a critique of misogyny and the
systematic oppression and objectification of women. In both chapters, he merges an already-existing body of theoretical work
with his own focus on the primacy of the visual. He cogently and convincingly argues that this oppression and objectification finds
its expression through the pervasive norms regarding the artistic depiction and representation of women.

Notably, he builds upon his conception of the artwork as rarified token and trophy of the ruling class, and merges that
conception with the identification of the sexist objectification of women. His citation of the salacious, objectifying manner
in which the Grand Duke of Florence both commissioned a painting that sexually objectified a woman and gifted that painting
(named Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love) to the King of France, provides a vivid illustration of the dual objectification of
women: not only are women objectified through their depiction within artworks, but they are objectified through the
material exchange of those artworks.

Through this case study of Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love, Berger craftily and succinctly demonstrates the dual objectification of
women without having to resort to lofty and inscrutable jargon—indeed, without explicitly parsing out these dimensions at all.
Berger then, through this case study, both invites his reader into his discourse and respects that reader‘s intelligence, trusting
them to pick up on the dual subtleties of his proposition through both osmosis and explicit understanding of his central
concerns.

Too, Berger‘s comparison and contrast of two paintings of the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders resourcefully combines
feminist critique and his own theoretical emphasis on the language of images. His nuanced and precise investigation on the role of
the mirror ingeniously allows him to undertake a full analysis of the ways in which the paintings engage multiple instantiations of
the gaze. Through this analysis, he clearly and precisely undertakes his own investigation of the language of the images, and
directly ties this language to the overarching ideology of sexism.

Firstly, Berger emphasizes that the paintings have been designed to appeal to the male gaze, which systematically objectifies
women and renders them instruments animated (or rendered static) for the sexual gratification of men. Secondarily, and perhaps
more vitally, Berger investigates both the gaze of the woman, Susannah, as she is depicted in the second painting, and the gaze
women—who, being conditioned by such images—must train upon themselves as a result of the machinations and mandates of
the male gaze. Berger notes that women who are given mirrors in paintings are depicted thusly in order to mount a
condemnation of feminine vanity. In an egregious display of misogynistic hypocrisy, these women, who have been designed to
be the objects of the male gaze, are not allowed to gaze upon themselves with pleasure. Through this ideological condemnation,
resolutely tied to the visual depiction
 21

of women, women internalize and normalize the abusive and repressive conditions of patriarchy. The paintings thus speak a visual
and ideological language. They exploit the cognitive primacy that images enjoy within the human mind in order to implant and
sustain sexist ideology, in both men and women. The two paintings of Susannah, examined in tandem, demonstrate the
preceding propositions through a clear-eyed and highly concrete case study. Through this case study, Berger successfully merges
feminist critique with his own emphasis on the visual as a both a concrete and an ideological language.

Another notable aspect of this chapter is Berger‘s definition of the nude. He painstakingly distinguishes the nude, as a visual and
ideological formulation, as wholly different from nakedness as a human state and experience. He also argues that the nude is an
enduring cultural language that has successfully made the transition from painting to photography, with all of its machinations
intact. In contemporary times, feminist artists, as well as everyday women who do not label their activities ‗Art‘, have intuitively
played with and subverted the dominant norms regarding the consumption of female bodies through the medium of the nude, the
selfie, and/or the nude selfie. These artists and laypeople have pioneered the selfie, in which the (woman or girl) looks resolutely at
her own expression—as if looking into a mirror—while simultaneously maintaining complete control over the image‘s
dissemination and final form (by means of filters and other visual embellishments).

In a sense, these works can be seen as a flaunting and reclamation of ‗vanity,‘ which in its properly reclaimed form is simply the
act of a woman enjoying and controlling her own likeness. It could be argued that Snapchat, originally developed as a ‗safe‘
means of sending nude photographs, might have been the next logical target of the propositions that Berger expounds upon
on this chapter. Just as the ideological machinations of the female nude found intact expression through the medium of
photography, the exchange and proliferation of nude photography through social media can be seen as the next frontier for
the transmission and reinforcement of the visual/ideological consumption of the objectified, unclothed female form.

Berger also asserts that any male figures depicted in paintings with sexually-objectified women were designed to be understood as
either soon-to-be-ousted rivals of the male spectator-owner, or figures with whom that spectator- owner was expected to
identify. He also notes that women were depicted as completely hairless, as body hair was traditionally associated with a sexual
power that, under misogynistic auspices, is considered to be the exclusive province of men. These two conventions are essentially
identical to the norms that govern contemporary production of mainstream porn. The study of porn as a contemporary visual
phenomenon with a particular set of conventions would therefore very easily fit into Berger‘s central hypotheses in this
chapter.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter Four is composed of reproductions of both pre-Renaissance and Renaissance paintings. Most of the paintings are
figurative, although a few of them are object studies. Many of them depict Christian subject matter or are explicitly religious
iconography. Others are mythology paintings. Still others are aristocratic portraits, while others are depictions of dead bodies.
All of the object studies depict food or animals.

Chapter 4 Analysis

This chapter is most probably a primer for Chapter Five, designed to be both a visual prelude and a resource that is
 22

revisited after Chapter Five is fully understood. Many of the paintings can be easily used to prove the central arguments of
Chapter Five—namely, Berger‘s assertion that oil painting was obsessed with rendering monetized and propertized objects in
order to flatter and affirm the ruling class‘s position and legitimize the global growth of capitalism as both an economic and
philosophical and moral system.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Summary

Berger opens this chapter by remarking that oil paintings often depict objects, which, in reality, are purchasable. He observes that
buying a painting is not unlike buying the object that a painting depicts, and putting it in your house. In making this observation,
Berger arrives at a central assertion of the chapter: oil painting incorporates the act and concept of possession as a way of seeing.
In other words, property relations are embedded in the conventions of European oil painting. He declares that this fundamental
truth about European oil painting is usually ignored by art experts and historians. Indeed, in Berger‘s estimation, it is the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—and not an art historian—who has come closest to naming this intrinsic aspect of oil
painting as a genre. He then quotes from Lévi- Strauss‘s work Conversations with Charles Charbonnier: ―It is this avid and
ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to
constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization‖ (84). Berger then remarks that, while Lévi-
Strauss‘s statement may be an overreaching generalization, if it is true, the sentiment it expresses reached its peak during the
period of traditional oil painting.

Berger then defines the term oil painting. ―Oil painting‖ is not only the name of a technique: the term also defines a particular art
form. Materially, the technique of oil painting has existed since antiquity. However, oil painting as an art form emerged
specifically in order to ―express a particular view of life for which the techniques of tempera or fresco were inadequate‖ (84).

Oil painting as a genre did not firmly establish its own conventions and its own way of seeing until the sixteenth century.
Although the end of the period of the oil painting cannot be dated exactly (oil paintings are still being made today), the basis of its
traditional way of seeing was challenged by Impressionism and usurped by Cubism. At around the same time as the rise of Cubism,
the photograph ousted the oil painting as the primary source of visual imagery. Therefore, the period of the oil painting can be
distinguished as approximately 1500-1900.

However, in Berger‘s view, the tradition and its underpinning ways of seeing still undergird many of our cultural assumptions.
From it, we derive our definition of pictorial likeness. The norms of the oil painting tradition still influence the ways in which
we see such things as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, and mythology. The oil painting tradition shapes how we conceive of
artistic genius. Furthermore, it defines what we mean as a love of art. From studying oil painting‘s history, its norms and
conventions, we have come to define a lover of art as a person who, fundamentally, loves to possess art objects. In turn, the art-
lover loves these art objects because they show him sights of what he may possess.

Berger then cites Lévi-Strauss again, who remarks that, for Renaissance artists, painting was ostensibly an instrument of
knowledge, but its more paramount function was to serve as an instrument of possession. Renaissance painting was itself
only made possible because of the immense wealth that was being hoarded in Florence and elsewhere. The Italian merchants
who commissioned Renaissance painters did so in order to confirm
 23

their own possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world through the commissioned artists‘ paintings.

Berger asserts that the art of any given period is inclined to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. This is an assertion
that he admits is somewhat hackneyed. However, his proposition goes further. He proposes that ―a way of seeing the world, which
was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in oil painting, and could not
have found it in any other visual art form‖ (87).

He then argues that ―oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations‖ (87). Within both capitalism and the
conventions of oil painting, all objects became exchangeable because all objects became commodities. All of reality was measured
through material property relations. Due to the reign of Cartesian philosophy, the soul was philosophically placed in a separate
philosophical category. Therefore, a painting was capable of speaking to the soul, but only through the secondary valences of
reference, and never through its primary manner of envisioning the world: ―Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority‖
(87).

Berger remarks that the oil painting tradition, in actuality, consisted of hundreds of thousands of paintings, although only a
fraction of that number are today treated as works of fine art. He asserts that art history has completely failed to attend to the
distinction between an outstanding work and an average work of the genre. He then reveals that, in his estimation, hack work
within the genre is a result of cynical adherence to the mandates of a commissioner or of the market. (Crucially, the rise of the oil
painting coincided with the rise of the open art market). For him, we must attend to the contradiction between art and the
market in order to fully parse out the contrasts between the exceptional and the unremarkable works of the period and genre.
This is a point that he will later return to.

Berger then observes the distinguishing features of oil painting as an art form. More than any other painting technique, it
can depict the textural tangibility and visual subtleties of objects. Its potential for creating convincing illusions is greater than
that of sculpture, ―for it can suggest objects possessing colour, texture and temperature, filling a space, and, by implication,
filling the entire world‖ (89).

He then turns his attention to Hans Holbein‘s The Ambassadors (1533), a work that stands at the beginning of the European oil
painting tradition. He observes that, within the painting, Holbein has skillfully created the illusion that the spectator is looking at
real objects and materials. Its lush details importune the sense of touch. While the painting does indeed depict the two male
ambassadors, and objects that symbolize ideas, the sheer volume of finely- made objects which surround the men is the truly
salient element of the painting. This pictorial emphasis, and the skill required in order to successfully produce it, would remain a
constant within the tradition of oil painting.

Here, Berger forwards the notion that oil painting distinguished itself from earlier art traditions that celebrated wealth,
because, in those previous traditions, wealth was understood as a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil painting, however,
celebrated a new kind of wealth: wealth which was capable of dynamic movement and change, and which found its only validation
not in an entrenched social or religious order, but in the supreme buying power of money. Thus, oil painting was tasked with the
mandate to illustrate the desirability of what money could buy. It did so by representing objects with as much sensory—and
especially tactile—detail as possible. The desirability of objects, after all, lies in the promise of their ability to gratify the senses
of their owner.

He also attends to the mysteriously-slanted and distorted likeness of a skull that lies in the foreground of Holbein‘s painting. He
remarks that most scholars agree that the skull‘s presence is a take on the medieval convention of the memento mori, in which a
skull was placed within an image to remind the viewer of the pervasive specter of death.
 24

For Berger, the most crucial visual element of the skull is its distortion: if the skull had simply been painted realistically
and as another item within the Ambassadors‘ horde, it would have become merely another object. This points to a persistent
problem within the oil painting tradition: any metaphysical visual symbols which painters attempted to incorporate within
their paintings were rendered ineffectual through the ―unequivocal, static materialism of the painting-method‖ which
stubbornly depicted these would-be allegorical items as, firstly and wholly, objects (91). The conventions of the genre itself,
with its hyper-focus on convincingly rendering material objects, precluded any attempted metaphorical message. Berger then
concedes that William Blake is one notable exception to this general tendency. With his aversion to oil paint and propensity to
render people and objects as insubstantial, transparent, and unmoored by the dictates of gravity, Blake transcended the
limitations of the dominant art of the period.

Berger then returns to Holbein‘s The Ambassadors. He observes that the two men within the painting communicate an
insurmountable remoteness through their stance and their gaze. Coldly indifferent to those whom they may hold in their gaze,
they wholly exclude the viewer from any possibility of joining them inside of their world. Indeed, the painted objects that lie on
the shelf that stands between the two ambassadors would only be legible to the selected few who could understand the objects‘
allusions to European explorers and the subsequent rise of global commerce and the slave trade.

Berger then directly correlates the ambassadors‘ cold, withholding glance, as well as the objects the painting depicts, to the logics of
colonialism. Among the objects on the shelf are a globe that charts the route that Magellan had recently taken during an
expedition that was conducted under explicit pretenses of resource extraction and colonial domination. Additionally, a book of
arithmetic, a hymn book, and a lute stand on the shelf. Through these objects, the painting directly invokes the colonial mandate to
convert native peoples to Christianity, and to convince them of the supremacy of European civilization and art. The ambassadors‘
stance and gaze can also be read as the hallmarks of their entire class: ―the two ambassadors belonged to a class who were
convinced that the world was theirs to furnish their residence in it‖ (96). Their gaze, which is both ―aloof and wary,‖ expects no
reciprocity (97). They aim to impress upon the viewer a sense of both their own vigilance and their own inaccessibility. This aim,
Berger notes, is not unlike the visual depiction of kings and emperors of eras past. However, oil painting inaugurated a new and
disconcerting element within this unoriginal power dynamic: the emphasis upon individuality. In keeping with humanist values,
oil painting was tasked with depicting individuality. That individualism, in turn, posits equality. However, through its visual
machinations, as exemplified by The Ambassadors, oil painting simultaneously renders that equality inconceivable.

The fundamental conflict between individualistic equality and the persistent inaccessibility of the ruling class reveals itself within a
central conceit of oil painting. Its emphasis on obsessively producing visual verisimilitude produces the illusion that the viewer is
within touching distance of anything in the painting‘s foreground. If the object in the foreground is a person, this verisimilitude
produces the illusion of intimacy. Yet, a painted public portrait of members of the ruling class must, by necessity of class relations,
enforce a formal distance. It is this necessity which renders the average portrait within the tradition stiff and rigid: these regents of
the ruling class must simultaneously appear close-up and far away, in much the same manner that objects appear under a
microscope. The viewer can plainly see these regents in all of their particularity and detail, but it is impossible to imagine that the
gaze is reciprocal. Faces within the oil painting tradition were thus transformed into veritable masks.

Here, through several reprinted examples, Berger emphasizes his central point that oil paintings were, fundamentally,
demonstrations of objects that money could buy: food items, animals, buildings as features of landed property.
 25

Berger then indicts the most esteemed category of oil painting—the history or mythological painting—as the genre‘s most
vacuous. To Berger, the purpose of such paintings was essentially to provide fodder for the members of the ruling class as they
used the lofty figures of classical literature and mythology to confirm and flatter their own inflated senses of themselves, the
grandiloquence of their own emotions, and their affected nobility.

Inversely, the so-called ‗genre‘ picture, which depicted ‗low-life,‘ illustrated the opposite of the mythological picture. The purpose
of its depiction of the ‗vulgar‘ was to ―prove—either positively or negatively—that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and
financial success‖ (103). These paintings, although cheap, were favored by the newly-arrived bourgeoisie who saw themselves
reflected within them: not by the characters within the painting, but by the moral that the scenes generated. Here, oil painting‘s
predilection for recreating the illusion of material reality lent credence to the sentimental moralizing that pervaded the period—
namely, the lie that a meritocracy ensured the success of the honest and hard-working, while bestowing a deserved life of poverty
on the ne‘er-do-wells.

Berger then remarks that the landscape painting was the type of painting within the oil tradition which least conformed to its
central aims of realistically depicting and fetishizing objects as commodities and legitimizing both the ruling class and the logics
of capitalism. This is due to the simple fact that, while aspects of nature could be objects of scientific investigation, ―nature as-a-
whole defied possession‖ (105). However, Berger asserts that the landscape painting found its footing within the at-large
ideological framework of the oil painting tradition by depicting land-owners as the gloating possessors of the landscapes that
served as their visual backgrounds. The ability of oil paint to render these possessed landscapes in extreme detail flattered and
increased the pleasure that these landowners derived from their status as landowners. He also observes that these landowners‘
estimation of ―the natural‖ was very narrow: it did not, for instance, include the very natural act that an unlanded intruder upon
their land might undertake if he were to steal a potato in order to nourish himself. (The penalties for such figurative
poaching included public whipping and even deportation). Berger therefore indicts this dubious and elitist definition of ―nature,‖
and its extrapolated connection to landscape paintings, as a classist machination.

Here, Berger quotes a fellow art critic who derides Berger‘s above position on landscape paintings and takes issue with Berger‘s
assertion that oil paintings normalized and naturalized the unequal circumstances that capitalism produces. Berger does so in
order to re-affirm his countering position, and to exemplify the myopic resistance to class critique within art criticism at
large.

Berger then concedes that his survey of European oil painting has been so brief as to render it rudimentary. He posits his own
investigation as a starting point for others. His salient point, though, stands: the particular qualities of oil painting produced a
specific system of conventions that governed the representation of the visible. In so doing, the conventions of genre invented a way
of seeing. Following those conventions, painting of this tradition, then, is not a window on the world, so much as it is a safe into
which the visible has been deposited, as an object.

Berger then dives into the various academic and cultural conventions that have contributed to the mystification of oil painting as a
genre, and thereby obscured the chapter‘s central assertions. For one, he feels that the few exceptional artists who managed to
break free of the norms of the genre are not today understood as anomalous resisters, but as representatives of the genre as a
whole. Secondly, the artists who openly defied the dominating mandates of oil paintings are now subsumed into a fraudulent,
oversimplified, and generic mythology of the great, suffering artist, instead of being recognized as renegades whose resistance
to the tradition‘s prevailing norms—and not a romanticized and rootless poverty—was the true cause of their destitution.
 26

He then offers two contrasting paintings by Rembrandt in order to demonstrate the criteria that Berger uses to distinguish
a painter whose work contravened the prevailing traditions of oil painting. In the first painting, Portrait of Himself and
Saskia(1634), Berger observes that Rembrandt uses the traditional methods of oil paintings for their traditional purposes.
Although the figure of the artist turns toward the spectator with a smile on his face while embracing his new bride, for Saskia
(who died within six years after the painting was completed), the happiness is both formal and unfelt. The painting, via its fidelity
to both the technical and ideological underpinnings of the oi painting tradition, thus functions as a soulless advertisement. The
later painting, a self-portrait completed when the artist had become an old man, turns the tradition of oil painting against
itself. Instead of functioning as an advertisement, it uses the language of oil painting to depict the artist‘s bereavement, and his
open questioning of his own existence. It is through this subversive resistance to the dictum to render both people and things as
either idealized commodified objects or the heroic regents and possessors of those objects that Rembrandt‘s work becomes
exceptional. He uses the language of the genre to do the opposite of that for which the language was designed.

Chapter 5 Analysis

If Chapter One can be seen as an introduction to Berger‘s central arguments, and Chapter Three as a marriage of pre- existing
feminist scholarship with his own original formulations, then Chapter Five is the section in which Berger most forcefully and
cogently asserts his own distinct perspective. This chapter, therefore, sees Berger‘s most sustained and direct development
of his theory regarding ways of seeing. Specifically, Berger cogently and systematically argues that oil painting invented a way
of seeing—a script, code, or language—which performs at least two crucial functions. For one, during its heyday, it produced and
legitimized capitalism‘s reduction of the entire world and its contents to objects ripe for possession by the privileged few.
Secondly, it continues to ossify the exploitative and oppressive hierarchical class system that capitalism necessitates by
virtue of the fact that this particular way of seeing the world continues to be used as a visual and ideological conceit that is central
to Western culture.

This chapter also sees Berger continuing to indict the prevailing norms of art discourse as he baldly accuses both a general order
of establishment art scholars, and a particular scholar (who remains unnamed) of perpetuating a purposefully mystified
vision of oil painting which obscures both the genre‘s underlying visual/ideological codes and its utility for entrenching class-based
oppression. He therefore sees these establishment scholars as complicit with the continued proliferation of capitalist propaganda
through their myopic study of oil painting, which refuses to critique the landed gentry (or ruling class) and to seriously come
to terms with the violence and exploitation of European global imperialism and colonialism.

Throughout the book, Berger exercises a light touch with his language, and refuses to rely on—or even to invoke— specialized
theoretical jargon from the fields he is clearly drawing on (including semiotics, feminist theory, Marxism, and linguistics).
However, this particular part of his writing method should not be understood as a reticence to engage with serious cultural,
social, political, or economic critique. As this chapter, in particular, exemplifies, Berger is deeply invested in the ways of seeing that
visual material produces—and, in turn, with the manner in which these ways of seeing have become indispensable ideological
tools which promote the naturalization and obfuscation of the unnatural and unjust inequality and greed that, for Berger, lie at the
center of capitalism. Specifically, this chapter lays bare the manner in which oil painting, and the distinct way of seeing that it
produced, is inextricably complicit with the injustice and inequality of a predatory global capitalism which reduces the world, in
all of its complexity, to a
 27

collection of objects which may be purchased and possessed by the minority ruling class.

By undertaking such a detailed case study of oil painting and its resulting ideological way of seeing, Berger emphasizes the
inherent artifice of that way of seeing. He is clearly fully aware that his audience, as capitalist subjects, may be so inured to
seeing the world around them as merely a collection of objects ready to be possessed
—or, more likely, as objects out of reach—that they are unaware of the fact that other ways of seeing the world may exist.
Berger, then, tasks himself with deconstructing a capitalist way of seeing the world, and leaves the mental space which he hopes
to clear in his reader‘s mind open, prepared, and ready to imagine other possible ways of seeing the world—other ways which
may not so simplistically and ravenously reduce all of the world to an array of objects which can (or cannot) be possessed.

The fact that this entreaty to the imagination—which is complementary to the deconstruction of the entrenched ideology—
remains implicit, can be understood in at least two ways. For one, it can be understood as a result of Berger‘s light touch and
seeming refusal to engage in either pedantry or highly-specialized academic rhetoric. A second way to read the direct absence
of an entreaty to the reader‘s imagination is as a failure. While Berger‘s diction does reveal a discomfort with the way of
seeing that oil painting and capitalism create, he does stop short of directly and specifically condemning both that way of
seeing and its adherents. Similarly, the absence of an articulation of any number of alternative ways of seeing can be read as an
oversight on Berger‘s part. A reader might ask where he or she is supposed to go next, after having the wool pulled off from
over their eyes.

Also, contemporary scholars could take issue with Berger‘s approach, which, as it attends to gender difference, and briefly touches
upon global European imperialism, does not fully carve out a theoretical framework that might be used to understand and
critique the ideological and visual production of race and racial difference. While Chapter Three dedicates considerable
sensitivity and effort to examining the plight of women under patriarchy, it contains no differentiating emphasis on the distinct
representations or concerns of women of color, and there is no corollary chapter exploring the representation of people of color at
large—either historically or contemporaneously. For all accounts and purposes, Berger‘s vision of the put-upon capitalist
subject, awaiting liberation, is a white woman or man. By naming this, we can identify a failing of his theory, which implicitly
forwards itself as a means of freeing the masses from the ideological manipulations of the ruling class.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 Summary

Chapter Six consists entirely of reproductions of photographs and paintings, both cited and uncited. Images that sanction and
support European imperialism and colonialism make several appearances, alongside the work of William Blake, depictions of
subordinate African slaves who revere their white masters, a depiction of a slave auction, portraits of the aristocracy, vulgarly-
rendered images of the poor or working class, images of idealized/objectified women, and depictions of animals which belonged
to the aristocracy.

Chapter 6 Analysis

Berger‘s selection of topics and depictions in this chapter seem to bridge and review Chapters Three and Five.He gives us
instances of the female nude, perhaps in order to remind us of its enduring conventions. He invites us to re- examine these
paintings with a new critical awareness, instead of passively consuming both them and their
 28

attendant ideology. He gives us examples of oil paintings that depict the world and the things within it—people, animals,
elements of nature—as objects that exist in order to serve as possessions. He showcases the manner in which visual art was used
to legitimize the racism, brutality and oppression of Western imperialism and the global slave trade. Again, he invites the
reader to look upon each of these images with a newfound criticality—an awareness of the ways of seeing which these
images both produce and are subject to.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 Summary

Berger opens the chapter by stating that our lives are saturated in ―publicity images.‖ (For the purposes of this guide, ―publicity‖,
―publicity images,‖ and ―advertisements‖ are synonymous). Berger also contends that this saturation is historically
unprecedented. He observes that, although we may remember or forget these publicity images, they stimulate our imaginations
during the fleeting moments in which we encounter them as we conduct our everyday affairs. Publicity images themselves also
belong to a unique temporality: while they must be continually renewed and updated, they rarely speak to the present. Instead,
they refer to either the past or speak of the future.

We have become so inured to the presence of publicity images that we fail to recognize their impact. They have become a
passively accepted fact of our surroundings. In Berger‘s view, this conditioning leads us to fail to recognize that, although
it is we who pass the images—during our walks in the city, while turning a page, while watching television—it is these publicity
images which actually pass us. In their frenetic cycle of renewal, they are dynamic while we are static.

Berger then points out that publicity/advertisement is often invoked as a public good which generates public good by increasing
freedoms: freedom of choice for the purchaser, freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. Indeed, the proliferation of
advertisements has come to be seen as a hallmark of ‗The Free World,‘ and is a feature that distinguishes the Western world
from, say, Soviet-era Eastern Europe. However, here, Berger crucially notes that, while advertisements are ostensibly designed to
compete with each other, advertisements—even advertisements produced by competing firms—feed on each other in order to
confirm and enhance each other‘s legitimacy and presence. Ultimately, publicity ―is not merely an assembly of competing
messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal‖ (131). It proposes that each of us
needs to transform our lives by buying another product. What‘s more, it proposes that the act of buying will enrich our lives—
although, paradoxically, we will have been made poorer by spending our money. In order to convince us of this proposition,
advertisements show us images of glamorous people we are meant to envy who have apparently been transformed through the act
of purchasing the advertised product. Indeed, for Berger, the very definition of glamour is the state of being envied.
Fundamentally, advertisements manufacture this glamour.

Here, Berger notes that it is important to distinguish between the language of publicity and the pleasure or benefits which arise
from the things that it advertises. By producing aspirational images and promising gratification through the acquisition of real
objects that have yet to be attained, publicity never produces the actual pleasure that it tantalizingly hints at. It therefore
concerns itself with the future-buyer, producing for the consumer an image of himself made glamorous by means of product
acquisition. Advertisements thus train consumers to envy their own future selves, who could come into being through the
purchase of whatever product is being advertised. Therefore, publicity is about social relations—not objects. It does not promise
pleasure. Instead, it promises happiness: the happiness of being deemed glamorous (and therefore enviable) by others. Berger
then specifies that a fundamental
 29

aspect of glamour is the manner in which it is not reciprocal. The glamorous are observed with interest but are absolutely
uninterested in their observers. The more impersonal a glamorous figure is, the greater their glamour. This is the logic that lies
behind the vacant, unfocused look of glamour advertising. Here, Berger provides two advertisements that demonstrate his
point. He furthermore propounds that the underlying logic of the advertisement is to make the spectator envy a future version of
themselves that could exist if they bought the advertised product— or, in other words, that advertisements steal a person‘s love
for him or herself, and then promises to sell that love back to them.

Berger then posits that there is a direct continuity between the language of publicity and the language of oil painting. For one,
sometimes advertisements directly invoke well-known paintings. Secondly, advertisements often feature or reference sculptures or
paintings as marks of prestige, wealth, and beauty. Thirdly, this act of figurative quotation invokes a cultural authority that is
attached to oil painting within the popular imagination: oil painting is understood to be the province of the sophisticated and the
highly cultured. However, more importantly than each of these points is the fact that advertising relies very heavily on the
conventions and language of oil paintings, so much so that side- by-side comparisons of advertisements and famous paintings
reveal prolific and striking similarities. Here, Berger provides several side-by-side comparisons that prove his point.

However, for Berger, the import of oil painting vis-à-vis advertising goes well beyond the issue of pictorial duplication. The true
connection between oil painting and advertisements is the fact that they use the same set of signs to communicate very similar
messages due to the fact that the two genres share an underpinning ideology: the ideology of capitalism and of consumer
society. Oil painting was, first and foremost, a celebration of private property. It is therefore erroneous to conceptualize
advertisement as the usurper of the visual art of post- Renaissance Europe: it is, instead, ―the last moribund form of that [very]
art‖ (139).

Berger then intimates that publicity is, essentially, nostalgic. Because advertisements, in themselves, cannot validate the credibility
of their own claims, they must refer to the past through both references and their very methods of signification in order to
produce any kind of legitimacy. They would lack both confidence and credibility if they were to invent their own contemporary
language. Consequently, advertisements invoke what the general public has already learned to recognize as beautiful, royal, or
enviable in order to successfully function: cigars are named after kings, the sphinx appears in an underwear advertisement, a
stately country house forms the background of a car advertisement. Furthermore, the references that advertisements make
need not be explicit nor demanding of a requisite learned understanding of the past. In fact, their vagueness and imprecision
are part of the power of their subliminal messaging. Lastly, the development of cheap color photography enabled advertising to
reproduce the tangible color and texture of products as only oil painting had been able to do prior. Color photography‘s
relationship with spectator-buyers is therefore directly analogous to oil painting‘s relationship with spectator-owners. Both forms
of media depict objects in hyper-detail that is designed to play upon the spectator‘s ―sense of acquiring the real thing which the
image shows‖ (141).

However, despite this shared language, the function of publicity images is very different from that of oil painting, because the
spectator-buyer occupies a social position that is highly distinct from that of the spectator-owner. While the oil painting showed
what its owner had already attained and therefore confirmed and consolidated that owner‘s sense of his own value, advertising
aims to make the spectator-buyer perceive a lack within his or her life which can be remedied through the purchase of the
advertised product. The oil painting addressed those that made money on the market. Advertisements address those who make
up the market: those from whom profit is dually extracted, because they are simultaneously the consumers and the workers
whose labor produces the very products that are
 30

being advertised. Consequently, the only places that remain relatively free of advertising are the provinces of the super-
wealthy: their money, and theirs alone, is theirs to keep.

Furthermore, Berger contends that all advertising preys upon anxiety. Under capitalism, everything can be boiled down to the
question of money. Therefore, to obtain money is to overcome anxiety. Inversely, having no money will render a person nothing
and no one. Money is both the indicator of and the key to every human capacity. Advertising makes use of this ideological
undercurrent in order to both stoke and exploit peoples‘ fears of becoming nothing through their lack of spending power, and
their desire to wield money as a means to become valid and lovable.
Berger observes that, in his day, advertising had begun to increasingly use sexuality to play upon the idea that wielding money
makes a person valid and lovable. Advertisements had begun to implicitly create the idea that the ability to buy something is
synonymous with being sexually desirable, while the inability to buy something renders a person sexually undesirable.

Berger then contrasts the temporality of oil paintings against that ofadvertisements. He observes that an oil painting was painted
as a depiction of its owner‘s present state, in order to affirm and flatter that owner‘s present image of himself, and to give his
future descendants a depiction of his present self. In contrast, advertisements are designed to appeal to the future self of the
spectator-buyer. Therefore, advertisements addressed to the working class often promise personal transformation, or a
transformation of their relation to others, through the purchase of the product they advertise. Furthermore, although
advertisements speak to an idealized future, that future is endlessly deferred and remains out of reach. Advertisements, then, do
not derive their credibility through their power to grant buyer- spectators the ability to realize an ideal future. Instead, they enjoy
credibility by relevantly appealing to the spectator- buyer‘s fantasies.

Berger then returns to the topic of glamour. He argues that glamour, in its contemporary instantiation, did not exist during the era
of the oil painting. Subjects of oil paintings—while they might have appeared wealthy, beautiful, happy or lucky—did not possess
identities that were wholly dependent upon being objects of envy (and therefore glamorous). This is because glamour
fundamentally depends upon personal social envy being a common and pervasive emotion. Berger then asserts that
contemporary American industrial society, which has progressed toward democracy and then stopped halfway there, is the
optimal society for creating the pervasive emotion of envy. In this society, the pursuit of individual happiness has been trumpeted
as a universal right. However, the existing social conditions prohibit the individual from feeling truly empowered. This produces a
fundamental contradiction within the American democratic subject. There are therefore only two options for this subject: he joins
the political struggle or a full democracy and the overthrow of capitalism, or becomes endlessly subject to an envy which,
exacerbated by his sense of powerlessness, dissipates into persistent daydreams.

Advertising, therefore, exploits the gap between what this American subject of a half-realized democracy feels himself to be
and what he would like to be. It does this by creating a corresponding gap between what it promises and what it actually offers.
These two gaps then become one. This gap is then bridged, not by action or lived experience, but by glamorous daydreams.
This process works in tandem with working conditions under capitalism. The seemingly endless expanse of time eaten up by
working is ‗balanced out‘ by the dreams of a future, in which the worker‘s present passivity is replaced by imaginary activity:
―[t]he passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self‖ (149). Advertising, therefore,
turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. Consumer choice serves as a substitute for political choice. Advertising
obscures the actual material conditions of inequality and compensates for that inequality through the diversion of spending
money. It proposes an entire, closed philosophical system that explains everything according to its own terms and provides a
means to
 31

interpret the world. The entire world, according to the terms of this system, becomes the setting for the fulfillment of
advertisement‘s promise of the good life. This world offers itself to us and is reduced to that which can be bought.

Here, Berger notes that the contrast between the closed philosophical system of advertisement and the actual condition of the
world is often a very stark one—especially in news publications which often provide coverage of peoples‘ destitution, tragedy, and
suffering right next to the polished, fraudulent, and tantalizingly glamorous images of advertising.

What interests Berger, however, is not the moral shock of these juxtapositions, but the way in which these juxtapositions
reveal that advertising is, fundamentally, eventless. Advertising, which situates itself in a future that is never fully realized,
forecloses all possibilities for development and the fruition of the self. Because, according to its logics, all that actually happens
occurs outside of itself, it renders true experience impossible. Also, advertising obscures this fundamental truth about itself by
using a language that renders tangibility an event in and of itself. The object advertised is rendered in great sensory detail,
awaiting acquisition. Because of this object‘s lush tangibility, the buyer-spectator feels as if he can almost reach out and touch it.
This imagined act of acquisition trumps all
other possible actions, and renders the desire to possess as the only desire imaginable. Under capitalism, all human abilities or
needs are made subordinate to the supreme desire to possess commodities. Advertising, thus, forecloses all imagination—
producing a cultural system in which hope, satisfaction, and pleasure can only be fulfilled through the purchase and acquisition of
products. Advertising is therefore both the life of the culture of capitalism and the sum total of all that is imaginable within that
culture. Capitalism, in turn, sustains itself by exploiting the majority of its subjects. It achieves this exploitation by harshly and
resolutely limiting the imagination of its subjects, and by dictating what is and is not desirable.

Chapter 7 Analysis

In this chapter, Berger makes strong use of the momentum set in Chapter Five in order to mount a strong critique of advertising, and
its central role in indoctrinating the masses into accepting capitalist ideology. Too, he continues to develop the essential populist
character of his theory by setting his sights on a subject that is usually ‗low‘ art/cultural production: advertising. Berger is far
from a traditional or establishment art critic or theorist, who might balk at treating advertising as anything on par with oil painting
or other forms of ‗High Art‘ and therefore worth serious investigation. Instead, he deconstructs the visual language of
advertising, and its tandem ideological purposes, with as much nuance as that which he dedicated to his study of oil painting.
This is because, fundamentally, Berger is not concerned with producing an art theory or criticism that is meant to be used or
understood by a minority class of experts. Nor is he interested in producing a theory with limited and specialized utility.

Instead, Berger is deeply concerned with the everyman, and with equipping that everyman with the ability to deconstruct
and move beyond the capitalist propaganda that advertisement produces. In a manner highly consistent with Chapters Three and
Five, which focused on the ways of seeing that the nude and the oil painting produced, respectively, Berger focuses on the
particular way of seeing that advertising creates. Specifically, Berger‘s central argument is that advertising is able to function as
propaganda because it produces a distinct way of seeing which simultaneously implants itself into the capitalist subject‘s psyche
while obfuscating its own origins and utility for entrenching a capitalist order and stringently curtailing that subject‘s capacity to
imagine a world that could provide something other than the enslavement and psychic imprisonment that capitalism creates.
 32

Therefore, this chapter‘s focus does not solely reveal a refusal to abide by the dominant norms of art theory. Instead, the chapter
poses itself as a means to educate and empower the masses.Ultimately, this chapter leaves behind Renaissance or pre-modern
objects of study and brings Berger‘s theories, with remarkable immediacy, to his present moment. Simultaneously, it retains the
central characteristic of his methodology: a razor-sharp focus on one particular genre/medium, a nuanced parsing of the
specific ways of seeing what that genre/medium produces, and an analysis of manner in which those ways of seeing are complicit
with harmful ideological indoctrination and the production of material inequality. In its immediacy and its focus, the chapter
temporally bridges its preceding chapters, while its theoretical framework duplicates preceding chapters‘ methodology.

Another notable feature of this chapter is its ability to re-work the Marxist ideas of commodity fetishism and alienation into
highly conversational, contemporary terms. This re-working also eschews solid development and contextualization of material
relations, in favor of a more psychological, cultural, and semiotic focus. In the case of the commodity fetish, for example, his focus
is not on the actual produced object itself and the circumstances of its material production, as might happen in traditional
Marxism. Instead, and in keeping with the focus of his book, he is concerned with a fetishism that pervades the visual systems of
advertising.

In Berger‘s re-working, the visual code of the advertisement produces a fetishized vision of fulfillment and pleasure that is
continually deferred. It is, essentially, that vision which is a commodity fetish, instead of an actual commodity itself. Berger
inflects the idea of Marxist alienation in a similar vein. In his estimation, the visual codes of advertising sharply limit the average
worker‘s ability to imagine anything beyond the fraudulent mirage of escapism that advertising offers. Capitalist subjects
therefore become alienated from the fullness of their human potential, as they pinball back and forth between the drudgery and
exhaustion of work and the tantalizing promise of escape that advertising dangles before them. Berger‘s formulation, therefore,
de-emphasizes the manner in which capitalist subjects are alienated from their labor and the products of their labor. Instead, he
chooses to focus more closely on an articulation of their alienation from their species-essence.
 33

Key Figures
John Berger

John Berger (5 November 1926–2 January 2017) was a British artist and writer. Ways of Seeing is a beloved classic of art theory
and education, taught widely in Western universities.

Berger formally instantiates his persona as one that is inviting, populist, and gracious through his casual, inviting, and
conversational writing style, which seems to purposefully eschew heavy-handed and inscrutable academic jargon.
Never condescending or superior, Berger is nonetheless able to render incisive, complex, and nuanced theoretical insights that
crackle with passion and immediacy. And, when it comes to critiquing capitalism and the ruling class, he does not mince words.

Ultimately, he forms his authorial persona in the previously-articulated ways in order to empower and appeal to his reader,
whom he seems to conceptualize as a member of the working class who could be an art student or scholar just as easily as he or
she could be someone completely uninterested in art. At its heart, Ways of Seeing is an understated manifesto and a call to arms.
Through it, Berger expresses the deep sense of indignity at the injustice that is being perpetuated by the ‗privileged minority‘—or
the ‗ruling class‘—under capitalism. Ultimately, he wishes to invite the reader not only into a deeper understanding of the visual
languages of harmful ideologies of sexism and capitalism, but to guide his reader into a position to be able to successfully
challenge and overthrow those oppressive languages. This demonstrates a revolutionary spirit with a distinct taste for
subversion and iconoclasm.
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Themes
The Corrosive Ideology of Capitalism

The corrosive ideology of capitalism instantiates itself by producing distinct manners of interpreting the visual world, or ―ways of
seeing.‖ These ways of seeing, in turn, produce an artificial and corrupt understanding of the self and the world, while
simultaneously posing themselves as natural, inherent, and indisputably true.

Each chapter in the book articulates and dissects a particular ―way of seeing‖—hence, the title of the book. Subsequently,
each chapter is related to the other because the end goal of each chapter‘s discrete investigation is to deconstruct a ―way of seeing‖
which capitalism produces. Ultimately, however, Berger‘s goal in each investigation is to point out the way in which these highly
constructed, mediated, and artificial ways of seeing normalize themselves as simply natural, and therefore become entrenched in
both our culture and individual psyches as the basic starting point for recognizing and interpreting our visual worlds. Therefore,
Berger‘s moral dispute with capitalism lays itself bare. For Berger, not only are these ways of seeing highly artificial, but they
empower and normalize the corrupt and greedy domination of the minority ruling class. Therefore, each chapter is an entreaty to
the reader to understand and recognize the particular ways in which they are being manipulated by a capitalist visual order.

The Entrenchment of the Common Person through the Manipulation of the Visual

By entrenching ideologically-engineered ways of seeing, the cultural and economic capitalist order sharply limits laypeople‘s‘
capacity to imagine a world that is other than capitalist domination.

Berger begins his book with the assertion that ―seeing comes before words.‖ Throughout the book, he invokes this central
premise. He does this in order to foreground the immense power that capitalist ‗ways of seeing‘ wield. These ways of seeing
essentially indoctrinate capitalist subjects into literally and psychologically seeing the world according to the imposed
mandates of capitalism and the oppressive class stratification that capitalism creates.

By dictating the manner in which both the visual and psychological world are understood, these ways of seeing sharply limit any
possible meaning that can be made through visual communication. Oil painting, for example, reduces the world to that which
can be owned, while other possibilities for envisioning both the world and the human‘s relationship to it are, in reality,
myriad. However, because of the manner in which these ways of seeing obscure and naturalize themselves as the only and
ultimate methodologies for making meaning out of visual phenomena, they limit the scope of the human imagination and
even dictate the manner in which visual communication is made. Indeed, they do not pose themselves as methodologies at all,
but essentially as a priori reality. Berger intends to indict these ways of seeing as artificial constructions, in order to
subsequently free his readers‘ minds and unlock their capacities to imagine both the world itself and alternative ways of seeing
that world that move beyond the narrow confines of property relations and an unopposed domination by the minority ruling
class.

Theory as Accessible and Promoting Critical Thinking and Positive Change

Berger‘s relaxed, conversational diction implicitly communicates this theme. Through his accessible voice and the
 35

marked absence of outside sources, he communicates that theory does not need to be heavy in jargon or complicated
esoterics in order to speak to peoples‘ present economic, political, or social condition. In fact, in this book, Berger seems to be
completely uninterested in producing theory that adheres to either academic or industry standards. As his criticism of the
prevailing modes of art scholarship elucidate, he feels that industry- or institutionally-sanctioned theory, at best, is largely
insular, myopic, and self-aggrandizing—and at worst, complicit in promoting an exploitative and oppressive class hierarchy.

He doesn‘t, however, completely build his theoretical formulations from scratch. In fact, at various points in the text, it is
apparent that he draws directly on pre-existing bodies of theoretical work, including feminism, linguistics, semiotics, and
Marxism. The marked absence of direct, cited reference to these bodies of work communicates that Ways of Seeing can be
merged with previously existing bodies of academic work in order to form a hybrid methodology that speaks to the masses
while synthesizing specialized academic discourse. In so doing, he forges a populist theoretical framework that could be called
revolutionary in both its deconstruction of oppressive ideology and the ease with which it can be used and understood by
laypeople.
 36

Symbols & Motifs

Ways of Seeing

This titular motif is, unsurprisingly, a central motif of the text. In the first chapter, Berger makes his case for the primacy of the
visual, and therefore legitimizes subsequent chapters‘ focus on distinct ‗ways of seeing.‘ For him, capitalist culture produces
and utilizes various distinct visual languages (or ways of seeing)that dictate the psychological, social, economic, and
political relations that capitalist subjects have with both each other and the world at large. Therefore, when Berger investigates
these ways of seeing through the lens of history, he does so in order to dissect and identify the manner in which the rising
capitalist world order produced distinct and sharply limiting visual languages that corresponded to its own political, economic,
and cultural aims. (The normalization of property as both an a priori reality, and property acquisition as the ultimate human
purpose are two examples of these aims.)

These visual languages, through the sheer power of the human faculty for sight, combined with the insidious potency of ideology,
have the ability to transcend genre. (Berger most cogently argues this point in his case study of oil painting.) Ultimately,
Berger‘s purpose for this motif is dual. Firstly, he wishes to deconstruct dominant modes of seeing. Secondly, and of equal
importance, he wants to rid these ways of seeing of their power and enable humans to use their incredible visual faculties to
imagine and instantiate relations beyond which those that capitalism imposes and enforces.

Mystification/De-Mystification

This recurring motif is the label that Berger uses to identify the manner in which capitalist ideology obscures its own production
and thereby poses itself as a self-evident truth. By identifying and indicting the processes of mystification, Berger hopes to
free art discourse from the cloud of elitism that persists in enveloping it, and also to reach beyond the norms of art criticism
through his investigations of the visual. Indeed, what Berger does in this book cannot even strictly be called art criticism, as he is
more concerned with the visual as an economic, political, and cultural formulation than he is with a rarefied conception of
‗Art.‘ This sustained concern is, in itself, a de- mystification. Berger therefore makes his populist aims very strongly known
through this motif.

The Nude

This motif is the central theoretical term of Chapter Three. For Berger, the nude is a particular visual form that is completely
distinct from the human experience of nakedness. Specifically utilized to entrench and promote the sexual objectification of
women under patriarchy, the nude is an aesthetic form with its own norms and dictates. The conventions of the nude, for example,
dictate that a woman‘s body must appear hairless and therefore without its own sexual agency. The nude is the means by
which the naked female body becomes objectified as a sight to behold. In turn, through the normalization of the consumption
of female bodies in the aesthetic form of the nude, the ideology of sexist, misogynistic patriarchy implants itself into the minds of
both women and men. The nude teaches women to surveil themselves as objects that must act in accordance with ultimate aim of
ingratiating and satisfying the male gaze. It teaches men, in turn, that they have the right to claim ownership and mastery over
women.

Oil Painting
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In Chapter Five, Berger examines the historical development of oil painting as both a genre and a distinct visual language. He
uses the motif of oil painting to articulate a specific way of seeing. He argues that oil painting was the first visual language of
capitalism, as the rise of the genre corresponded with the rise of global capitalism. The genre‘s obsession with rendering objects
in hyper-realistic detail was corollary to the capitalist assertion that all of the world can be reduced to the status of property, to be
owned by the ruling class. The conventions of oil painting, then, ultimately entrenched, served, and normalized the capitalist
worldview and its attendant class domination.
Furthermore, he argues that, due in no small part to fact that global capitalism is still a dominating force, the conventions of
oil paintings continue to exercise considerable influence on the ways that Western cultures both produce and understand
visual material, such as the depiction of food, mythology, and landscapes.

Publicity Images

This motif provides the central focus of Chapter Seven. Building upon his explicit investigation of capitalism, Berger uses Chapter
Seven to elucidate and deconstruct the manner in which prolific ‗publicity images‘—or advertisements
—propagandize the masses and promote adherence to capitalist exploitation. Firstly, publicity images posit a future temporality
that promises escape from the drudgery of labor and into unburdened pleasure. Even though that escape never comes to
satisfactory fruition, publicity images—by virtue of the perpetual proliferation of consumer goods— provide an inexhaustible
outlet for the frustration and lack of fulfillment which capitalist subjects perpetually feel.
Secondly, by positing this illusory escape as the only conceivable means of accessing pleasure, publicity images
sharply curtail the imaginative capacities of Western ―democratic‖ subjects. Publicity images, therefore, erect and abide by their
own set of distinct visual conventions. Those conventions ultimately reproduce and entrench capitalist exploitation and
oppression.
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Important Quotes

1. ―Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing
comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but
words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never
settled.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 7)

This is the opening of the book. Here, Berger begins laying the groundwork that will give his arguments credibility and immediacy. He
asserts the primacy of the human visual experience. In Berger‟s view, although written language is clearly important, words are not the
means by which we have our first experiences of the world, and they are never fully adequate tools by which we name and understand the
world. This is because before we acquire language and learn to use it to name our experiences, we see the world. No written language can
compete with the primacy of the visual, and no written language can fully capture or depict the way that we visually experience the world.
Berger elucidates this preliminary assertion in order to eventually argue for the vital, critical importance of identifying and
deconstructing the visual languages around us. For Berger, because of the primacy of the visual, images have an unrivaled power to
form human consciousness and entrench ideology. Here, he invites us to recognize that power, so that we can see his subsequent
arguments as valid and necessary.

2. ―An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been
detached from the place and time in which it made its first appearance and preserved—for a few moments or a few centuries.
Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record.
Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity
of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer‘s way of seeing is reflected in his
choice of subject. The painter‘s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper. Yet, although every
image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 10)

Here, Berger develops his conception of ways of seeing. His assertion here serves as a theoretical anchor for the work at large.
Namely, he argues that every image, in its embodiment of a way of seeing, conforms to a set of norms and conventions that dictate its own
production, perception, and interpretation. These norms and conventions both derive from and entrench the culture, political climate,
and material conditions surrounding the image. Berger here entreats the reader to move beyond a passive consumption of all images, and
into a recognition that every image constructs both a visual and ideological field.

3. ―Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions
about art. Assumptions concerning:
Beauty
Truth
Genius
Civilization
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Form Status
Taste, etc.
Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. (The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes
consciousness.) Out of true with the present, these assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never
there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and
its past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past
entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in
action.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 11)

Here, Berger continues to develop his theory of ways of seeing. He asserts that the way that one looks at any work of art is never a
question of pure mechanical reaction to stimulus. Instead, it is a complex process of forging understanding, interpretation, and
value judgments that is rooted in a set of “assumptions” which derive from popularized and normative conceptions of art. He then
articulates that, while culture is impermanent and contextual, those assumptions, which derive from an earlier time period and culturally-
entrenched notions about art, become out of line with the changing world. Therefore, the evaluation of art based on that set of
assumptions obscures actual understanding of art.

4. ―In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can
retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern times. And so,
inevitably, it mystifies.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 11)

In this quote, Berger baldly names both the progenitors and beneficiaries of the cultural mystification of the art of the past: the few,
privileged members of the ruling class. He asserts that these members of the 1% purposefully normalize the use of obscurant
assumptions to interpret and understand art in order to justify and legitimize their own role as members of the corrupt ruling
class.

5. ―Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way. This difference can
be illustrated in terms of what was thought of as perspective. The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and
which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a
lighthouse—only instead of light traveling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality.
Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point
of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 16)

This quote exemplifies Berger‟s theoretical methodology. Firstly, he asserts that the manner in which we look at art, or our ways of
seeing it, should never be taken for granted as any kind of natural or neutral process. Instead, he asserts that the way in which we see
art is itself a highly constructed, mediated set of conventions which arises out of particular cultural, historical, and political contexts.
Here, he parses out the convention of perspective, which was a guiding principle of Renaissance art, as a specific convention that
illustrates that assertion.
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6. ―The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was
transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the
uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many
meanings.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 19)

Berger states that, due to the ease and ubiquity of photographic reproduction, the way in which we see and make sense of paintings has
fundamentally changed. Through this assertion, he is essentially articulating that the conventions by which we access and understand
painting have changed due to both technological and cultural change. Attending to this causal effect, and to the changing manner in
which visual art is accessed and contextualized, is emblematic of Berger‟s iconoclastic approach. The judiciousness with which he
parses out the changing modes of access and the subsequent new avenues for meanings that they create is antithetical to the ruling
class‟s favored, mystifying, and ossified approach to examining and interpreting art/painting.

7. ―The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value,
has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the
final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive,
the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 23)

Here, Berger does not mince words in his indictment of what he sees as the corrupt machinations of the ruling class. In his estimation,
the ruling class has conjured a fraudulent aura of religiosity, with which they gird original works of art. They have done so in order to
contravene and compensate for both the increased access to works of art, and the production of new meanings, which photography
ushered in. Photography deeply damaged the elite, rarefied status of the original work of art through its ability to cheaply and easily
reproduce and distribute duplicated images of paintings. In so doing, it endangered the very status of the ruling class as the sole
possessors and arbiters of art. In order to reclaim and hold onto the power that they wielded prior to the development of photography, they
deepened the fetishization of the original work of art, producing the cultural narrative that original works of art were imbued with a
pseudo-religious aura that reproductions could never emanate. Berger incisively points out here that that aura is far from being
metaphysical: ultimately, it derives from the material market value of any given painting. He also boldly asserts that this ruling-class
machination is their desperate attempt to preserve a society in which their own interests, solely, are protected, and their pronounced
stakes in the continued production of inequality remain untouched.

8. ―If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could
begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only
personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking
to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.‖
(Chapter 1, Page 33)

Here, towards the end of Chapter One, Berger repeats his opening proposition: “seeing comes before words.” He does so after he has
mounted a strong critique of the ruling class, and illustrated that class‟s vested interest in both mystifying art discourse at large and
fraudulently fetishizing original works of art. Consequently, his opening salvo takes on added gravity. If the masses can wrest the power
to dictate the norms and conventions which formulate
 41

peoples‟ fundamental psychological, cultural, and economic relationship to art, they can begin to harvest the primacy of the visual to create
new ways of seeing which do not duplicate and enshrine the outdated and oppressive status of the ruling class. Instead, they could form
ways of seeing which accurately and vitally correspond to both their own personal experiences, and to a truer, fully-contextualized
experience of their historical relation to the past.

9. ―One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
This determines not only the most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The
surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an
object of vision: a sight.‖
(Chapter 3, Page 47)

In this quote, Berger concisely illustrates the particular way of seeing that the nude, as a visual formulation bound by a distinct set of
conventions, both responds to and instantiates sexist ideology. Within the conventions of the nude, the naked female form is
consummately objectified in order to appeal to the male gaze. The conventions of the nude exist in this way because of the patriarchal
culture from which the genre originates. Also, however, these conventions move from works of visual art and into the culture.
Because they so strongly and almost subliminally sanction the objectification of women, women internalize their logics, and
therefore objectify themselves.

10. ―To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one‘s own skin, the hairs of one‘s own
body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked.
Nudity is a form of dress.‖
(Chapter 3, Page 54)

In this quote, Berger strongly and clearly distinguishes the nude, as a mediated visual form that follows its own set of rules and
conventions, as an entirely distinct entity from the state of being naked. Because the nude fetishizes and objectifies the female body, it is
a genre that is inexorably filtered through sexist ideology. The genre therefore does not produce images of „natural‟ nakedness: it is
pure artifice. Because of this fact, nudity is, itself, a form of dress: it masks and disguises the female body under a coat of fetishizing
and objectifying ideological and visual filters.

11. ―In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the
picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there.
It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger
—with his clothes still on.‖
(Chapter 3, Page 54)

Here, Berger cogently names the power relation that the genre of the nude entrenches. Even though the nude female is the figure being
depicted, she is wholly objectified, and is therefore in no way the image‟s protagonist. Instead, the protagonist is the unpictured and
presumably fully-clothed man. He is the figure for whom the objectified naked female body exists. Through its visual codes, the nude
therefore legitimizes and normalizes the oppression and dehumanization of women while it glorifies and flatters men.

12. ―Today the attitudes and values which informed [the] tradition [of the nude in academic painting] are expressed through
other more widely diffused media—advertising, journalism, television. But the essential way of seeing
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women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men—
not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the ‗ideal‘ spectator is always assumed to be male and the
image of the woman is designed to flatter him.‖
(Chapter 3, Page 64)

Here, Berger reiterates the power dynamic instantiated by the nude, but also adds a crucial assertion which develops one of the text‟s
central messages. By pointing out that the attitudes and values which contributed to the historical tradition of the nude have migrated to
contemporary forms of visual media, he illustrates the manner in which ways of seeing function. While they are deeply tied to the genres
from which they originate, their ideological nature, and their connections to the larger society, render them translatable and
transferrable. That is why the conventions of the nude oil painting can travel to other forms of media, with their power and
messaging intact.

13. ―Oil paintings often depict things. Things which in reality are buyable. To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not
unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting you buy also the look of the thing it represents. This analogy
between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting is a factor usually ignored by art experts and
historians.‖
(Chapter 5, Page 83)

This quote, from an early section of Chapter Five, demonstrates Berger‟s sustained and incisive focus on ways of seeing, and his
fidelity to his theoretical methodology. Having just completed a nuanced interrogation of the modes and ideological underpinnings of
the nude, he turns his literal and conceptual gaze to the oil painting. He clearly asserts that the norms and conventions of the oil
painting were deeply informed by the capitalist practice of propertizing, monetizing, and acquiring objects. He also continues his
subversive streak, pointing out the fact that this aspect of oil painting, which is for him fundamental, is lamentably overlooked by
authors of mainstream academic art discourse.

14. ―Works of art in earlier traditions celebrated wealth. But wealth was then a symbol of a fixed social or divine order. Oil
painting celebrated a new kind of wealth—which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power
of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual
desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.‖
(Chapter 5, Page 90)

Here, Berger attends to both the visual and the cultural/historical intricacies of oil painting as a genre and a way of seeing. He notes that,
while the celebration of wealth was hardly an unprecedented phenomenon, that celebrated wealth was understood in distinct terms. It
was understood as a result of an immovably stratified social or religious structure. A newly-budding global capitalism, however,
ushered in a new historical era—in which the only force dictating who could amass wealth was no longer an entrenched religious or
social system, but the free market. Oil painting, therefore, was tasked with visually depicting the desirability of the commodity fetish. It
did so by rendering all propertized and commodified objects in as much realistic, lush visual detail as possible. According to Berger, the
explosion of capitalism, therefore, was instrumental in producing the visual language of oil painting.

15. ―[The Ambassadors] is painted with great skill to create the illusion in the spectator that he is looking at real objects and
materials. We pointed out in the first essay that the sense of touch was like a restricted, static sense of
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sight. Every square inch of the surface of this painting, whilst remaining purely visual, appeals to, importunes the sense of touch.
The eye moves from fur to silk to metal to wood to velvet to marble to paper to felt, and each time what the eye perceives is
already translated, within the painting itself, into the language of tactile sensation. The two men have a certain presence and the
there are many objects which symbolize ideas, but it is the materials, the stuff, by which the men are surrounded and clothed
which dominate the painting.‖
(Chapter 5, Page 90)

Here, Berger continues with the conceit of the previous quote, emphasizing his point that the realistic rendering of fetishized objects
was the animating impetus of the development of oil painting as a visual language. This primary visual and ideological concern was so
strong that the ambassadors, the ostensible subjects of the Holbein painting to which he dedicates a sustained case study in this chapter,
are, in reality, secondary to the painting‟s depiction of an array of objects.

16. ―The gaze of the ambassadors is both aloof and wary. They expect no reciprocity. They wish the image of their presence to
impress others with their vigilance and their distance. The presence of kings and emperors had once impressed in a similar way,
but their images had been comparatively impersonal. What is new and disconcerting here is the individualized presence which
needs to suggest distance. Individualism finally posits equality. Yet equality must be made inconceivable.‖
(Chapter 5, Page 97)

In this quote, Berger attends to the ideological messaging attendant to Holbein‟s depiction of the ambassadors. He does so in order to
illustrate an additional element of oil painting‟s visual language. While the distant and on-guard expression of the ambassadors is, in
itself, preceded by a tradition of depicting kings and emperors, oil painting was ostensibly inflected by humanist values which complicate
the two men‟s remoteness. While humanism champions the individual, and thereby posits equality between all men, the mandates of
capitalism and its production of a ruling class foreclose the possibility of true equality. Therefore, while the visual language of oil
painting depicts each ambassador in highly individualized terms, it actively contravenes the notion of equality by simultaneously
depicting them as wary, inaccessible overseers with whom the unwashed masses will never be invited to identify. Through this insight,
Berger illustrates the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the ruling class, and therefore indicts the underlying capitalist ideology of oil
painting.

17. ―We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question
which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it
is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody
demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this
allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself.‖
(Chapter 5, Page 109)

In this quote, Berger recites a counterargument to his own in order to directly refute it. He successfully turns a critique against him
on its head. In his view, his sustained focus on the issue of property, and its formative influence on the genre and conventions of oil
painting, is a result of a discerning investigation of capitalism. While his critics accuse him of being obsessed with property, he asserts
that they are guilty of refusing to account for the ideological and cultural power that capitalism exerted on the medium of oil painting.
What‟s more, he believes that their refusal is not simply the result of ignorance. Instead, it is borne out of a desire to preserve both the
ruling class‟s exalted
 44

station within the current cultural order, and their outdated, dishonest art discourse. This quote, therefore, exemplifies
Berger‟s iconoclastic and subversive edge.

18. ―We are not so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. A person may
notice a particular image or piece of information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we accept the
total system of publicity images as we accept an element of the climate. For example, the fact that these images belong to the
moment but speak to the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar that we scarcely notice it.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 130)

In this quote, Berger points out a central concern of his theory. He states that we have become so inured to the ubiquity of
advertisement that we fail to attend to the subtleties of its visual language. Instead, we allow ourselves to be conditioned and
indoctrinated by it. This is an essential and repeated element of the text. In his previous investigations of both the nude and oil
painting, and, now, the advertisement, Berger contends that the ideological and visual languages of each medium have been obscured
and mystified. These ideological and visual languages have therefore posited themselves as rootless, transcendent, and natural.
Berger‟s goal, however, is to relentlessly uproot the normalized and obscured foundations of these visual languages in order to free
people from their thrall.
Specifically, in this quote, he is implicitly issuing a call to arms. He is entreating his readers to attend to the intricate, powerful visual
and ideological systems of advertising, so that they can move beyond being passively-indoctrinated subjects.

19. ―It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one firm competes with another; but it is also true that every publicity
image confirms and enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself,
which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and
that cream, that car and this car, but 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.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 131)

In this penetrating quote, Berger breaks through an illusion that capitalism produces. Through the existence of multiple competing
companies, capitalism creates the illusion of both consumer choice and corporate autonomy for individual businesses. However, in
Berger‟s perspective, this illusion obscures the ultimate reality: that each advertisement is, fundamentally, an advertisement for
capitalism itself. This point is central to the visual language of advertising. It is a way of seeing which legitimizes and normalizes the
exploitative existence of capitalism through subliminal ideological messaging.

20. ―Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle
that you are what you have. It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post- Renaissance Europe; it is
the last moribund form of that art. Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the
standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both
confidence and credibility if it is used in as strictly contemporary language.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 139)
 45

Here, Berger again argues for the transferability and versatility of ideological/visual ways of seeing. In a sense, this quote thereby
retroactively validates Chapter Five‟s content. Berger‟s sustained, exacting focus on oil painting is justified, because contemporary
advertising relies on the underlying ideology of oil painting in order to successfully indoctrinate the populace. The reader, therefore,
understands why Berger has spent so much time and effort mounting an exhaustive analysis of oil painting‟s methodology. Too,
this quote exemplifies Berger‟s previous assertion that history is not a hermetically-sealed, self-contained truth, waiting to be
discovered. Instead, he posits that our conception of history is always rooted in our experience of the present. This quote directly
illustrates and validates that very proposition.

21. ―The oil painting showed what its owner was already enjoying among his possessions and his way of life. It consolidated his
own sense of his own value. It enhanced his view of himself as he already was. It began with facts, the facts of his life. The
paintings embellished the interior in which he actually lived. The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally
dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys
what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 142)

While the previous quote articulates a bridging ideology that joins oil painting and advertising, this one recites a point of divergence
between the two genres. Oil painting was a medium that was designed to appeal to and flatter the ruling class. Therefore, it glorified and
exalted what the class had the power to own, and thereby memorialized that class‟s stably-vaunted status. Advertising, however, is
designed to appeal to the working class—those that the ruling class exploits and dominates. Therefore, it must both appeal to and
create a sense of lack in the members of the ruling class. Although the ideological and economic system that provides the context for
both oil painting and advertising remains, consistently, capitalism, the visual codes of advertising must be tinkered with in order to
produce that distinct appeal.

22. ―Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which
has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of
individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel
powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious
of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which, entails, amongst other things,
the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness,
dissolves into recurrent day- dreams.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 148)

Here, Berger connects his conception of glamour to a material political analysis. While previous passages focused on the visual
formulation of envy, this passage represents a somewhat rare moment for Berger: one in which he unflinchingly indicts
contemporary Western society and its governance. Most of this text is spent articulating the visual codes of various genres of images,
with veiled, somewhat cryptic, or generalized criticisms of „the ruling class‟ and capitalism. Here, however, Berger boldly asserts an
unequivocal criticism of Western society‟s democracy. He states that advertising skillfully exploits the failures of democracy in its
subliminal messaging, carving out the space for its own necessity while simultaneously misdirecting the populace from pursuing real
political or social change.
 46

23. ―Publicity adds up to a kind of philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets the world. The
entire world becomes a setting for the fulfillment of publicity‘s promise of the good life. The world smiles at us. It offers itself to us.
And because everywhere is imagined as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less the same.‖
(Chapter 7, Pages 149 - 150)

This quote articulates a crucial element of the way of seeing that advertising constructs. Berger here asserts that advertising creates its
own, enclosed world of meaning. In an almost identical manner to the one in which oil painting reduced the entirety of the world and
the human being‟s possible experiences of it to the idea of property and ownership, the advertisement reduces the world to that which
can possibly be bought. It forecloses all imagination of satisfaction and fulfillment beyond the consumerist act.

24. ―The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes of tangibility an
event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other
actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 153)

Here, Berger again demonstrates that the logics of oil painting have reached their apotheosis in the medium of the advertisement. As he
states in an earlier passage, color photography perfected oil painting‟s obsession with rendering objects in extreme, realistic
detail. The ability of photography to appeal to the sense of touch through its convincing, detailed replication of the likeness of objects is
exploited by the language of advertising in the same manner that the painter‟s ability to render objects was exploited by the genre of oil
painting. In both cases, the ability to create realistic images of objects is used in order to normalize and enshrine the central philosophy
of capitalism: that the act of object/commodity acquisition is the only and ultimate human aim.

25. ―Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great importance. But its offer is as narrow as its
references are wide. It recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to
this power. All hopes are gathered together, made homogenous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet
repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged
within the culture of capitalism.‖
(Chapter 7, Page 153)

Here, again, Berger laments the manner in which the visual language of capitalism reduces the human character, condescends to
human capabilities, and simultaneously oversimplifies and redirects human desire. By creating psychological weakness and then
exploiting it, the visual language of advertisements (very successfully) asks human beings to buy into its illusions. Ultimately, the
language of advertising does not sell products: it sells the philosophy and culture of capitalism, within which nothing is desirable
nor even imaginable but the use of purchasing power to try to find a fulfillment which is constantly deferred. The visual language of
capitalism creates a closed-circuit system, which perpetuates and justifies its own existence.
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Essay Topics

1. Choose a contemporary advertisement. Use Berger‘s principles and methodology to elucidate the ways of seeing that the
advertisement both utilizes and creates. Tie these ways of seeing to contemporary political, economic, cultural, and social
contexts.

2. Choose a photographic work of art from a time period other than our own. Use Berger‘s principles and methodology to
elucidate the ways of seeing that the advertisement both utilizes and creates. Tie these ways of seeing to the political, economic,
cultural, and social elements that formed the contexts for the work of art‘s creation.

3. Select a contemporary depiction of a woman that conforms to the conventions of the nude. The image can be from any
number of visual contexts—advertising, memes, fine art, political photography, etc. Use Chapter Three as a starting point for
your visual investigation of your chosen image. In what specific ways does it conform to the principles of the nude? Why do
you think it was designed to conform to those principles? (Take its context and purpose into account.)

4. Select a contemporary depiction of a woman that does not conform to the conventions of the nude. The image can be from any
number of visual contexts—advertising, memes, fine art, political photography, etc. Use Chapter Three as a starting point for
your visual investigation of your chosen image. In what ways does the image refuse conformity to the conventions of the nude?
Why does it refuse conformity, and what is its alternative message? What propositions could this refusal be forwarding? Does it,
instead, display fidelity to other visual codes? If so, name and elucidate those visual codes. What are the image‘s subversive
elements? What particular message or provocation does its visual formulation articulate?

5. Compare and contrast the three major ―ways of seeing‖ that John Berger analyzes: that of the nude, that of the oil painting,
and that of the publicity image. In Berger‘s perspective, what do each of these ways of seeing have in common? How are they
different from one another?

6. Use Berger‘s methodology to forward your own theory about the visual language of race in Western society. Use at least 3
images–one of which must be historical, and another of which must be contemporary—to exemplify and ground your
theoretical analysis.

7. Explain the structure of Ways of Seeing. Carefully analyze each chapter, and track the development of Berger‘s central
theoretical claims. What specific rhetorical strategies does he use in order to build his argument? Why is the book sequenced the
way it is?

8. Summarize Berger‘s critique of capitalism. Use varied passages from different parts of the book to clearly re-state
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the central arguments that help him to mount an indictment of capitalism. Be sure to touch on both the material and cultural
elements of his argument.

9. Compare and contrast Berger‘s arguments in Chapter Three against the work of a feminist scholar. You may choose a
feminist scholar working in the field of aesthetics, but you may also choose a feminist scholar working in a different discipline.
Please limit your historical scope from 1960 to the present day. How are Berger‘s arguments similar to those of your chosen
scholar? How are they different? Cite Berger and your chosen scholar at length, in order to draw out their similarities and
differences.

10. Compare and contrast Berger‘s assertions with those of Karl Marx. How are Berger‘s arguments similar to those of Marx?
Can you point out any specific areas in which Marx‘s influence on Berger is pronounced? Elucidate them. How are Berger‘s
arguments different from Marx‘s, in both substance and focus? Cite Berger and Marx at length, in order to draw out their
similarities and differences.