Berger challenged the authority of Western art criticism and offered an alternative to the smooth narratives of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series.
Ways of Seeing popularised the early 1970s shift in the discipline to "the New Art History", which questioned everything from the representation of gender and the politics of patronage to the absence of women artists (and female academics).
JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING BOOK ANALYSIS HOW TO
He showed us how to look and think independently about painting and visual images in the media. Inspired by the likes of Walter Benjamin and Claude Levi-Strauss, Berger took advantage of the mass media of TV and paperback publishing to create a kind of "Visual Literacy 101", asking ordinary people to reject preconceptions about the exclusivity of art and to see themselves as part of the history of art. He wanted to overthrow the art establishment's intellectual stranglehold on the history of our art: "Our principal aim is to start a process of questioning." As any good revolutionary knows, knowledge is power. The book continues to be influential, and remains on student reading lists for both art history and media studies.Īs befits a public intellectual and Marxist art critic, Berger's project was both revolutionary and educational.
JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING BOOK ANALYSIS SERIES
In the early 1970s, John Berger almost single-handedly changed the face of art history with this work and the four-part BBC TV series that accompanied it.
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