Ways Of Seeing

This art theory book, based on the BBC televison series hosted by John Berger, was a major influence on my formative self.  It was pretty much my introduction to post-structuralism and neo-Marxism in criticism: and it still reads very powerfully, several decades on. It was originally published in 1972, but I'm in slight shock over that because it so reads like a book of the Sixties. Guess the mainstream always takes a few years to catch up.

I so wanted to write a book about music entitled Ways Of Hearing - but Ben Thompson went and beat me to it several years back. (Good book, too.) Anyway, I love the following passage (loosely based on an essay by German philosopher Walter Benjamin)...

... because works of art are reproducible, they can, theoretically, be used by anybody. Yet mostly - in art books, magazines, films or within gilt frames in living-rooms - reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justified most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seems noble and hierarchies seem thrilling. For example, the whole concept of the National Cultural Heritage exploits the authority of art to glorify the present social system and its priorities.

The means of reproduction are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible. But sometimes individuals use them differently.

Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.

What are we saying by that? Let us first be sure about what we are not saying ...