Those classes’ “new attitudes to property and exchange” found “visual expression in the oil painting.” And so, “oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. “European art between 15 served the interests of successive ruling classes,” he writes. Berger believed that the individual was born along with the Renaissance, and that changes in philosophy, global capital, and art history occurred in perfect coordination. Similarly, the grand historical narrative of modernity is key to Ways of Seeing. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” His statements on gender, for example, reduce reality to a set of false axioms: “Men look at women. Berger loves synopsis, and he generalizes in ways that are at times outright misleading. The great weakness of Berger’s writing comes from the same source as its success. Berger does not refer the reader to any feminist theorists in his chapter on the male gaze. He expresses surprise that anthropology might enlighten art history, as if other thinkers hadn’t been lifting ideas from that weird field all century long. Berger’s chapter on photography’s impact upon the idea of the “original” is an accessible retelling of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Elsewhere, he paraphrases Claude Lévi-Strauss on oil painting and possessions. Several of the chapters in Ways of Seeing are essentially explainers for other, more complicated works. Gender politics, the role of the visual in abetting capitalism, colonialism’s special investment in that role: He whistle-stops past them all. In this small work, Berger gives a basic primer on the complicity of the European art tradition from 1500 to 1900 with the politics of the same period. Berger takes his readers beyond the visible, towards a closer understanding of the world as it really is-the one capitalism, patriarchy, and empire try to hide from you.
Berger points out that the globe hovering behind Holbein’s The Ambassadors refers to incipient empire and so to racist violence. European conventions on perspective, he argues, offer the world up to the covetous viewer with a deference found in no other tradition. He tells us that still-life painting did not depict objects qua objects, but as items to be owned. He explains the difference between the painted nude-seductive, objectified-and the naked human being.
In fewer than 200 pages, Berger whips the curtain back on contemporary advertising’s roots in European oil painting. It is very short, for one thing, and it moves very quickly.
0 kommentar(er)
