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)...
