Kyle Moyo
FIYS 122: Visual Art and Poetry
03/08/23
Word Count: 752
Summer Assignment:
Summary of Essay 1 of “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger et. al
Ways of Seeing is a book collaboratively authored by John Berger et. al and published in 1972 by
Penguin Books. “Essay 1” of Ways of Seeing examines how various agents of human perception
influence art creation and consumption, with a specific lens over the painting form. Berger
appeals to a paradigm in which the way art is viewed affects its conception and the way it is
created dictates its consumption. His arguments are relayed through skillful navigation of key
ideological frames and elucidated by his persuasive language style and engaging presentation of
ideas.
At the crux of Berger’s (7,10) interpretation of art is the idea that the visual sense is
distinguished from words as the initial, fundamental perceptive stimulus for both the imagination
of that which is not immediate and the documentation of that which is. Insofar as art is conceived
from the relationship between condition and perception at a particular point in time and space,
the image conjures a more lucid projection than text in the Platonic cave of reality that is the
artist's perspective (8-10). Surrealist painter René Magritte’s painting, Key of Dreams presents a
shadowy sequence of disparate image and text pairings as a powerful abstraction of the difficulty
for the non-visual prompt to describe intuitively what we see (7).
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Berger (9-10) subsequently posits that vision involves two inextricable mental
processes—the physiological registration of a visible object and the ulterior aspect of
consciousness; one’s ability to understand the bi-directionality of their perspective, epitomized in
the understanding that sight is relative to the one who sees. Herein, the role of a visual artist
becomes far more significant and, met with evolving aesthetic standards, conventions, and other
societal conceptions of value, has bolstered the intellectual pursuit of art criticism that Berger
argues can, left to its devices, encourage a dogmatized approach to art consumption undermining
its primary strength as an intuitive medium (10-11, 16). This phenomenon is exemplified (a
staple argumentative technique of the author) in the hasty, reckless attribution of class
consciousness by critics to impoverished artist Frans Hals in his final paintings of a house of
Dutch Governors and Governesses in seventeenth-century Haarlem (14-15).
The second tenet of Berger’s postmodern evaluation of art is the need to address the
subversive emergence of the camera, a means for mechanically capturing and storing images,
that has fundamentally altered the art world (16-17). Essentially, the earlier phenomena are
doubly compounded and altogether distorted. Whereas it was forced to be singular in the work of
Renaissance-era artists, we are now forced to reckon with the newly plural nature of perspective
in the age of film, photography and image reproduction (16-17).
In the constructive sense, it is more challenging than ever to detach the camera’s image
from the time(s) and visual space(s) of its production, but a reproduced painting, on the other
hand, will be viewed virtually everywhere excluding its original home (18). This, Berger (19-20)
imagines, marks the end of the historical relationships between distinct paintings and distinct
places but the beginning of new amalgamations of meaning, wherein a painting could equally
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exist as proof of the cultural heritage of a national gallery and as insight into the life and
character of a single person, referenced in their living room.
Increased accessibility of what was once a status-exclusionary novelty, has coincided
with a revolution in the view of an art piece’s value. Originality has been commodified to denote
a piece’s marketability to the affluent or intellectually discerning instead of the imaginative
prowess of the artist (21-23). Berger (23-24) believes that art appreciation and class are
inseparable, referring to data on the demographics of art museum visitors, who, it should be said,
are overwhelmingly educated and upper-middle class. These factors contribute to the obfuscation
of meaning and understandable dismissal of its value by those either less privy or privileged (33).
In the stream-of-consciousness fashion of Essay 1’s structure, the author’s conclusion
returns gracefully to its dialectical heart, understanding the impossibility of the era, and
evolutions in ways of seeing that are indescribable without the chaotic deployment of direct
quotes and diagrams, rhetorical questions and authoritative statements, lush figurative imagery
and concrete data (28). Ultimately, intent, nuance, and awareness are the champions of
navigating the modern art landscape and the problem, more pressing than that of copyright and
ownership, of perspective—the invaluable representation of one’s history that was once
preserved indiscriminately by art (32-33). For Berger, one thing is sure: the art of the present is
irreconcilable with that of the past (33).
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Works Cited
Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 7–34.
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