Ways of Seeing

"Not entirely pointless, but he does take a radical, 1970s Marxist view. The book was written to accompany a BBC television series, which was very refreshing in its day but is now a little bit dated. The reason I chose it is that Honour and Fleming don’t give any grounds to the Marxist interpretation. They’re good on other interpretations—like the feminist perspective. But you need to know about Marxism because it still holds the field in most universities around the world. The Marxist interpretation of art history says, ‘Look beyond the art and see who is controlling whom, who has the power, who is controlling the means of production and the means of exchange.’ Berger never actually deviated from that classic Marxism in the rest of his life, though he died a couple of years ago. “Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life.” And it is a very, very exciting new way of looking at pictures. Another brilliant book is The Painting of Modern Life , by T J Clark, who followed Berger. You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. Which I think is very healthy."

"John Berger was a great Marxist art critic who died earlier this year. This was originally a television show in the 1970s with this very serious, slightly grisly art critic talking about art and culture. It’s just one chapter of the book, but he makes some very interesting branding points about how many oil paintings in the past, particularly portraits, when they were commissioned by the subject, were designed to show the subject and his—usually his—possessions. He then moves from talking about that to talking about contemporary advertising. This is in the 1970s but it’s still just as true now. He talks about publicity. I think nowadays we would probably use the word ‘branding.’ He talks about consumer culture and says that publicity is the life of this culture. So branding is at the essence of the consumer culture that we live in. He is then critical. “To brand is human, and when you look at the history of branding, you can easily get back to ancient Egyptian times” He’s a Marxist and in this book says that the role of publicity or branding is to make people marginally dissatisfied with their current way of life. So you show people an image of something aspirational—whether it’s a shiny car or a bubble bath or whisky—and they feel, ‘I wish I had that,’ and that fuels consumer society. Berger’s view is that it’s a dangerous force that makes millions of people dissatisfied in the interests of capitalism. I think that’s a very telling critique of what we’re up to in branding. We spend a lot of time, on my university course, on the ethics of branding. Those of us who are in the business do need to take the ethics of it seriously. Branding is a very powerful force, and like most powerful forces, it can be used for good or ill. If your position is that of a comprehensive critique of capitalism, then there’s going to be very little branding that you’re going to like. I’m not as extreme as that, but I do think that there are areas where branding has a very bad effect on people—and, at Wolff Olins, we try and stay away from. We don’t work for tobacco companies. We don’t work for weapons manufacturers. Those are clear, but of course most of life is a grey area. A couple years ago we had the chance to work with the manufacturer of one of the most successful but also very violent computer games. We had a long debate about whether we should do that or not, and eventually we didn’t because we felt that it was using branding to encourage violence. We didn’t think that was the right thing to do. Well it is. When you think of the days when cigarette manufacturers were allowed to advertise, it was very potent advertising. If you smoked Marlboro, you’d feel like a cowboy. When you put it down in cold print it’s completely absurd, but at the time it was very powerful. Yes. I think it’s very, very important that there’s always a critical voice in what we’re doing. I suspect that compared with 10 or 20 years ago, there is a much stronger critical voice in the room—not least because consumers are so much better informed. It’s also much easier to switch from one provider to another. All over the world, many consumers are now prosperous enough to be able to make their purchasing decisions partly on ethical grounds. So I don’t think the ethical questions are really avoidable now."

"I use Berger’s book as a piece of primary research towards the end of my own book to show how, when Berger published his art history in the 1970s, traditional attitudes were starting to break down around the representation of the nude body. Meanings around the nude in art history had been upheld and rarely subject to much criticism, in fact, until his book appeared. That’s when traditional interpretations started to fall apart. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book is structurally quite innovative. Not only do I appreciate his arguments, but I really liked what he does in the way that he puts it all together. Ways of Seeing has certain pages with very little text, sometimes no text at all, where Berger puts images from high art, Renaissance painting for example, in juxtaposition with soft porn magazine advertising from the early 1970s. He shows very clearly how the two examples are drawing on a shared language. That was revolutionary at the time, though interestingly, although that’s 50 years ago, it remains really relevant. Parts of the book may now feel dated and have been superseded by more recent criticism, but I still recommend it in my teaching as an entry level text for new students coming to the study of visual culture for the first time who haven’t really thought about it before. It’s still a really interesting little tome, and about much more than the nude of course. I like what he does by dismantling established hierarchies. His ability to form a pithy statement, whether or not we agree with that pithy statement, is one of the charms of the book. Berger gives you these provocations. One that I really liked is where he says, “nudity is a form of dress”. That really interested me because, in part of the teaching and research that I do, I cover histories of photography as well as histories of fashion. It seems to me that you can’t really discuss nudism without discussing clothes – clothes are the enemy! Clothes are the antithesis. So you have to look at these two things in relation to one another. I find that quite an exciting provocation. Undress is as important as dress."