The Seminal TV Series That Changed How We See

[Celerity]

Fifty years after its debut, Ways of Seeing still offers valuable lessons for how to explore—and question—the visual world around us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/05/ways-of-seeing-john-berger-art-criticism/629806/

https://archive.ph/bYKov



The BBC miniseries Ways of Seeing opens with a close-up shot of the British art critic John Berger standing in front of a large framed painting—Botticelli’s Venus and Mars—hanging in a museum. “This is the first of four programs in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting,” Berger intones in voice-over. On-screen, he pulls a box cutter from his pocket and begins slicing into the painting. As he removes the face of Venus, the hole left behind reveals a blue wall where the back of the frame should be; we have not, in fact, been looking at the wall of a museum, but rather, a rudimentary set constructed inside a recording studio. This visual doubles as a concise summary of the show’s premise: In art, and in life, things are rarely as they appear.

Ways of Seeing, which first aired in 1972, is an undeniably humble project: four 30-minute episodes, filmed with very little in the way of a production budget (the plain blue wall revealed in the opening gag serves as the background for most of Berger’s monologues). The program seems to be an indirect response to more traditionalist narratives of art history, in particular Civilisation, another BBC show from just a few years prior. Berger, whose Marxist influence put him at odds with much of the fine-art world, seemed to see uncritical veneration in those narratives, which obscured both the true intentions of the painters and the social order to which they belonged. So he created his own series, an audacious rejoinder intended for a general audience in which he freely explored topics such as the role of the female nude in the European painting tradition, the importance of situational context to the art-viewing experience, and the aspirational nature of advertising photography.

The result is neither the most exhaustive nor the most sophisticated of art-history curricula; Ways of Seeing is rough around the edges, rushed in some places and overly repetitive in others. And yet these flaws seem to contribute to the show’s charm and appeal. Berger’s intended audience might be one that is not yet deeply knowledgeable about art. But his brilliance was in understanding that beginners, too, deserve to be treated as intelligent, capable of thinking sharply even as they encounter unfamiliar concepts for the first time.

The modest show was an unexpected hit, lauded as groundbreaking by critics and beloved by audiences. Now, 50 years later, the series and its book companion are still frequently assigned in undergraduate art-history classes, and its unsentimental yet approachable style has made it a touchstone for those who write about art, beauty, and advertising. Berger’s most famous quip recently appeared as an epigraph in the supermodel Emily Ratajkowski’s essay collection on the discontents of being famously and professionally beautiful: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” In much of the Western canon, Berger argued, the positioning of the female nude suggested that she was being captured not on her own terms, but rather in a state of performance, her personhood mediated by the painter’s desire.

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[Anon-C]

1. Nice.

Thank you!