Ways of Seeing

An interesting little book written back in 1972 and based on a BBC TV series in which John Berger strongly suggests that Fine Art is an age-old conspiracy against the common man.

It's lighter and leftier stuff than Baudrillard, but likewise suggests that all images express conventions and make use of devices that lead us to certain conclusions, and that these generally tend to reinforce the worldview of the owning classes.

He draws some interesting parallels between publicity images and traditional oil painting. For intance, he suggests that Hans Holbein's Ambassadors are early examples of subjects portrayed in order to make us feel envious of (or socially inferior to) them, and also of our future selves, who might perhaps be like them. They are observed with interest by the artist, yet patently decline to return that interest with their gaze. Berger also says that the famous anamorphic skull at the base of the two figures was painted that way to preserve its metaphysical message. A 'natural' skull would have become yet another materially possessable object in their collection, polluted by mundane, secular meanings, absorbed into the aesthetic of desirability.

According to Berger, publicity images steal our love of ourselves for what we are and sell it back to us for the price of the product or service in question. They propose that we transform ourselves through its purchase. "Glamour cannot exist without social envy being a common and widespread phenomenon."

One distinction he makes between the two traditions is that oil painting consolidated the owner's "sense of his own value", whilst publicity tends to shake it. Yet I'm sure that a lot of people that subscribe to glossy magazines for the high-net-worthy, as well as being tempted by advertising to part with chunks of their wealth, also find images of expensive property that they don't own quite reassuring.

For the rest of us drones, publicity encourages us to live in a dreamt future where "imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment." Before it was deprivation that forced us to define our interests quite narrowly; now it is the media and the communications industry that undertakes this important role for the capitalist economy.

For me the most striking idea in the book was the notion that great artists are more often those that transcend the norms they grew up with, rather than rejecting them completely and establishing alternatives. (NPPs - New Paradigm Poseurs?) Such men have many superficial imitators, says Berger, but hardly any followers. Meanwhile, hack creativity results whenever the cheque is more meaningful to the artist than the values that the work expresses.