Instead, Berger gives us the tools we need to question what we thought we knew about art, each other and the world around us. At the same time, the show never attempts to put forth any argument of its own.
While Berger aspired to become a philosopher of the common man, he leans into a body of critical theory which - to the uninitiated - may seem redundant or abstruse. Professors assign Ways of Seeing because it is more entertaining and digestible than the writings of Béla Balázs or Siegfried Kracauer, though its contents are no less complex. It is also considered a pioneering work in the study of visual culture, with Berger’s ideas going on to serve as the conceptual bedrock of that young but increasingly important academic discipline. The show as a whole has since become required viewing for media studies and critical theory courses across the world. As of November 2021, the first episode of Ways of Seeing has racked up nearly 2 million views on YouTube. If the show’s initial reception was better than expected, it paled in comparison to the cult following Berger attained over time. Writing for The New Republic on the occasion of Berger’s death in 2017, Jo Livingstone said that, to its biggest fans, Ways of Seeing represented the first time that a critic “trusted them to see past the appearance of things (…) Berger takes beyond the visible, towards a closer understanding of the world as it really is - the one capitalism, patriarchy, and empire try to hide from you.” Over the course of four half-hour episodes, Berger lays out his own iconoclastic interpretation of a specific tradition in European painting - a tradition which, he claims, was born during the height of the Italian Renaissance, and died when the advent of the camera began to push painters from naturalism towards abstraction.Īssembled in his parents’ living room, Berger’s stimulating program was met with rave reviews upon release. Ways of Seeing, which premiered on the BBC in 1972, was edited in a rapid and ephemeral style reminiscent of Orson Welles’ video essay about Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory: F for Fake. Now, in the second half of the 20th century, because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before.”
“Tonight,” he says as he attempts to isolate the figure of Venus from the rest of the image, “it isn’t so much about the paintings themselves I want to consider, as the way we now see them. In the opening scene of his television show Ways of Seeing, John Berger - a British critic, painter, and author - uses a boxcutter to methodically slice and dice his way through the canvas containing Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars.
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