Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ways of Seeing
1972
Printing from studioit
http://www.studioit.org.uk
Printing lecture overheads
• Find lecture on studioit, under Stage 1
• Right Click PPT. Do NOT choose Print Target
• Choose Save target as
• Save Powerpoint to your files or to the Desktop…
• Once file is saved, choose Open
• The file is now open in Powerpoint
• Find Print what: Choose Handouts
• Find Color/grayscale: Choose Black and White
• Find Slides per page: Choose number. Click OK
Academic Reserve
• Video, as per all texts on any Bibliography
this semester, is on the Academic Reserve
• Ask for the video at the Helpdesk at the
entrance to the Library
• Quote Title and Shelf Number: V2194
• Borrow headphones.
• Watch on video player on 5th floor of
Library
‘The relation between
what we see and what we
know is never settled’
Video
• Ways of Seeing. 4. The Language of Advertising
(videocassette). London: British Broadcasting
Corporation; 2001.
• (There are 4 videos in total, all worth viewing, but 2 in
the collection are currently damaged. On re-order.)
Berger’s Ways of Seeing
• A turning point in the history and analysis of art
• Introduces a political (Marxist, left wing) challenge
to the traditional art historian.
• Does not separate and privilege fine art from a
wider analysis of visual culture
• Critiques the elitism of the European oil painting,
analysing it in relation to contemporary media and
advertising
• Mirrors concerns in the contemporary art world
critiquing the connection between commercialism
and the true purpose of art
• Mirrors the concerns of previous and contemporary
thinkers over the manipulative nature of mass
media and consumer culture
E. Panofsky (1892-1968) -The Iconographic
Method
• Primary – straightforward
description.
• Secondary – more specific.
identification through specific
details.
• Intrinsic – introduces details
of the wider artistic and
historical context:
• as belonging to a time, place
and age, texts, documents,
precedents, contemporary
influences, the prevalent style
of the artist etc.
The crisis of art history
“aesthetes and iconographers
on the one hand tending the
shrines of genius and
antiquity, and revolutionaries
on the other, bent on
overturning the temples of
art, mammon and patriarchy
(Fernie, E. 1995)
Thomas Gainsborough.
Mr and Mrs Andrews. c1750
Kenneth Clark on Gainsborough in
‘Civilisation’
quoted in Ways of Seeing. P.106.
J Berger. 1966
http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/sanford.htm
Vance Packard.
The Hidden Persuaders.
1957
‘What the probers are looking
for, of course, are the whys of
our behaviour, so that they can
more effectively manipulate our
habits and our choices in their
favour….to probe why we are
afraid of banks, why we love
those big fat cars…’
V Packard. 1957
Ways of Seeing