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5 Responses to “Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series”

1. darragh o'donoghue says:

   August 10, 2010 at 2:05 pm

   Thirty years later, “Ways of Seeing” is still a major primary textbook, not only for students or interested in the visual arts, but each film humanities literature. You can call for teachers – difficult, but critical theorists such as Benjamin and Roland Barthes are viewed with a light bite explained, even if sometimes the effect of the caricature of their work. As Geoff Dyer has noted received, the majority of pulses cultural studies, critical / academic form post-modernism, be attributed to Berger and the TV series in the book have raised many issues and areas of study pinponted an entire academic industry.

   In seven chapters, Berger attack the bastions of traditional art “satisfaction” with his obscure jargon, elitist interests and, with the most severe consequences, its insistence on timeless, nicht’historical “values. three of these tests are text-free, image-based, and Berger claims all the tests may be read independently and in any order, particularly in the process of “deconstruction” of the device art criticism, exposure of the mechanics, manipulations and limitations of his arguments, and undermines the idea of authorship of a coherent policy that the name “John Berger, a collective of five parts.

   contrary to what Mr. Berger, the image-essays can only be properly understood in relation to the text. These four parts are now classic critical iconoclasm. synopsis of the first famous essay by Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and describes how art and the culture it embodies, has diluted its old authority in an era of Demystifying lost. Chapter Three analyzed image overload the classical tradition of the nude, and misogynistic / patriarchal worldview confirmed. A related chapter, five shows, such as oil painting, far from finished soul of the viewer, was used to celebrate and confirm property, unequal social relations, including slavery. The final chapter describes the legacy of this tradition in advertising and public relations modern. ” p> Most of the ideas keep Berger remarkably well three decades later, not robust enough to need the linguistic acrobatics of his successors. As it should, but for a book advocating the return of the history of criticism or art, “Ways of Seeing” is itself a historical document. Not only in the sense of pioneering work, a little in his language, on a bit about his own ideological presuppositions. Unlike his disciples Berger still seems to love the art, even if his’ exceptions seem to lack method. Some of his very personal discussions on love “seems a little embarrassing, but I’m probably repressed. expected his Marxist convictions would have been the element of the book obsolete, but the clarity and passion of his ideas are refreshing in these ideologically compromised times.

   No, what I mean is that if Berger has written this book, he was very rebellious outsider to enter the cultural institutions and assumptions underlying the various social inequalities. While politically little has changed, the industry has been made on culture in the image of Berger. All works of criticism on literature, film, art, even history is now shaped in some way the ideas formulated here. It is ironic and sad that a book dedicated to opening minds and new ways of seeing (and thinking), should have replaced one monolithic worldview with another.
   Rating: 5.5
2. Anonymous says:

   August 10, 2010 at 3:13 pm

   Ways of seeing the book in a novel and brilliant TV series that Berger created with Mike Dibb in the 1970s. The book is not so surprising that the series, but it has the canonical status as the text most frequently mentioned, Berger learned about art and art criticism. Which is a shame, because while the impressive confidence judgments Berger was inspiring back then (Marina Warner and Michael Ondaatje have each paid tribute), time spent in the last quarter century, and the book is in danger of the former. The theory of desire, which Berger manages to popularize in one concise chapters, has been challenged is confirmed, upside down and worked on as a rule since the book was written that his version of it is now insufficient. Advertising is far more demanding than it was in the year 1972 – the ads reproduced in the book, while perfectly representative of their era, are almost laughable in their blatant sexism and classism. (You would not go out with them now, for sure.) But the account of the rise of oil painting is still persuasive, even if it lacks the cheek and mischievousness of the TV version. Readers Berger expects criticism most striking and complex should be found elsewhere, although the sense of sight or on the research, because Ways of Seeing is essentially an extension of theories that become much more complex and Berger pithy, no-argument tone is hardly applicable. Someone should publish the series on video, then we would have the same ideas in an appealing and fascinating ways.
   Rating: 5.3
3. Pumpkin King says:

   August 10, 2010 at 4:57 pm

   Ways of Seeing is a collection of seven essays. Three are picturesque, four are textual. All are art, how art is to see how it is assessed, how it is used, and what can we learn from the contemplation of art.

   test is the first text on the mystification of art and history through its associations with assumptions and values that are not necessarily inherent in the work itself, but in its rarity , uniqueness, and commercial demand. He discusses art as seen as a quasi-religious symbol, and how the reproduction of images contributed to the mystification of the original image.

   The second essay is a textual study of women and how they are seen, which she sees, and how they see themselves as seen by others. He is critical of Shepherd of the nude as an art form, and he says they see women as objects to be desired place and controlled by men, the object.

   The third article focuses on the tradition of oil painting in Europe between 1500 and 1900. Berger explains the connections between the content of these images and the title to them as a symbol of abundance, the products of capitalism and the preservation of the status quo.

   The fourth test has to do with advertising or publicity, and to emphasize that such images of oil paintings to sexual attraction and dissatisfaction with the current state of life ( the promise of a better future, as something) buy.

   I am not an art historian, and I do not know much about theories of art. But the ways of seeing is a book that goes into the comfortable notions of art as belonging to the elite and cultured, and reveals his role as used to maintain power structures. Who commissioned the work order, which means he looks, which is exposing its political motivation? These are questions that should be made by any work of art, and Berger wants to ask these questions. It also provides the reader.
   Rating: 5.5
4. Anonymous says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:20 pm

   I must admit that it is an excellent book. This is not only a wonderful series of essays on art, but a historical study of the ideological function of visual discourse. Berger “shows” how the design of visual images, the viewer’s perception of images and forms of what they are trying to represent. Chapter two and three, on “ways of seeing women” are particularly suitable means of which certain attitudes are powerful visual representations and reflects how those attitudes are reaffirmed for the viewer. Berger argument that discourse – visual, in this case – is never purely objective, but always reflecting a particular way of seeing the world. This is not to say that we should try our special way of seeing – which can be done to overcome. It is rather a call to recognize the point of view, we have become used to reproduce ourselves in our own lives.
   Rating: 5.5
5. Robert Moore says:

   August 10, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   Just in the years after thirty years, John Berger is one of the best views of popular descriptions of academic and scientific thinking in recent decades. There are currently very few original ideas in Berger’s book. Almost all the content in a variety of thinkers is a source of inspiration, which is owned or controlled by the Frankfurt School, for example, Meyer Schapiro, Adorno, Walter Benjamin and special. None of these thinkers are well known names in the English speaking world, although even the largest Schapiro, art critic America has produced can, in spite of Benjamin and, where appropriate, with the greatest cultural criticism 20th Century. An account of their ideas have not become widely known is the fact that all these thinkers were deeply influenced by Marxism, but none of them were Communists. As are the result, while many of the ideas in Berger’s work in literary and scientific circles known, they remain unknown to most casual visitors to art museums.

   for Berger, views on art and other images that ignore the status of works of art as a product challenge. We not only live in a capitalist society, but in which almost all of its inhabitants are consumers. Consumers buy commodities. Berger wants to educate the viewer of these images, that they not only “increase masterpieces, but the raw materials. Or in the case of oil painting, visual representations of the raw materials.

   ; The key assumptions are made in a series of tests. The first is a simple representation of the main ideas in Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a fact that Berger recognizes the end of the test. (This test is easily the largest collection of lighting Benjamin, and traditional tests on Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, and his amazing “Theses on the philosophy of history should be sought.”) He continues to write on these issues, the importance of nudity (as opposed to nudity) in the paint and the ideological use of oil paint was used. It ends with a discussion of the marvelous real point of advertising (which had to be committed to the resettlement of all European nations and U.S. consumer society).

   The great virtue of this book is that Berger has a knack for what was for many of the relevant findings of the Frankfurt School and is a real talent for presenting these ideas in a tangible form of light. The book reads beautifully, even after several decades. I think the book would benefit from a second edition with a complete overhaul of photographs. Although the contents of the book keeps very well, pictures too often smack of the sixties, while the book feel more like a fragment of the past, as it should. However, one of the best views of popular science in recent decades, but I hasten to add that any academic would also enjoy reading.
   Rating: 5.5