"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak."
In this, the very first line of the book, Berger already sets forth a radical premise: looking at art is an experience that can't be bound by words, because the act of looking predates the knowledge of language itself. He also hints towards the notion that looking is a relational act, a point that he will later develop in greater depth. This quote is followed by an explanation that vision inevitably precedes language, because we are constantly in the world, necessarily surrounded by objects before we can ever name them. "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled," he continues, setting the stage for the book's later analysis of how seeing is a subjective act, influenced by the relationship between us and whatever we're looking at. While this may now seem obvious, it was an extremely radical proposition at the time, directly challenging the conventional narrative from art history that a work's meaning was unchangeable and resided within the piece itself, rather than its context or the conditions of its viewing.
"We never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves."
Here, Berger continues to develop his counter-argument to the traditional tenets of art history. While more conventional art historians such as Kenneth Clark propose that an object's meaning is located within the thing itself and possesses fundamental, unchangeable properties, Berger argues that the relationship between a viewer and an object must change our understanding of the object itself. Because viewing is never static, but indeed an ongoing process that happens whenever we move through the world, the meaning behind the objects that we see cannot be expected to be static, either. This quote offers the radical proposition that an artwork's meaning is as dynamic as the conditions that prevail in the experience of its viewing.
"Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y."
In this quote, Berger acknowledges something that may now seem obvious, but at the time was extremely controversial: that a work of art is not a direct representation of the world as it existed when the work was made, but rather, it is a representation of how the artist saw the world. To put it differently, every work of art is a mediated representation of the world—it reflects the social, ideological, and political conditions of its construction. Berger adds that "the world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness," noting that this fact doesn't negate an artwork's value as a document of reality. Instead, it indexes reality even more richly, accounting for the fact that the real world as we experience it isn't made up of pure objective truths, but our own subjective interpretations of them.
"If we 'saw' the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation?"
In this quote, Berger elaborates how the relational act of viewing an artwork can provide valuable historical understanding, precisely because each artwork is a document of the conditions that existed at the time of its making. Given that no historical narrative can ever be completely objective—every narration of history, from a painting to a textbook, is influenced by the beliefs of the person who made it—art can provide valuable insight into how people saw the world during a given time. He goes on to acknowledge how powerful this fact is, drawing our attention to the fact that the forces in power may actually attempt to obfuscate artworks that contradict the prevailing conditions of the present. Here, he notes that "the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms." Berger makes a powerful argument for the political urgency of understanding art history.
"The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings."
In this quote, Berger distills the core ideas of Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility. Benjamin's treatise famously analyzed how the shift from artworks that were not mechanically reproducible—paintings and illustrations, for example—to those that were, from bronze casts to photographs, qualitatively changed the nature of the works themselves. A mechanically reproducible artwork can be viewed anywhere, untethered from its intended location and copied infinitely. Resultantly, the image's uniqueness—what Benjamin calls the "aura"—evaporates, as it's no longer bound to one specific space-time situation in which it can be viewed. While this may sound like a bad thing, both Benjamin and Berger point to its revolutionary potential: a reproducible artwork creates room for a multiplicity of different meanings, offering greater accessibility and opening up far more diverse interpretations.
"The meaning of the original work no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is. How is its unique existence evaluated and defined in our present culture? It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity. This value is affirmed and gauged by the price it fetches on the market. But because it is nevertheless a 'work of art'—and art is thought to be greater than commerce—its market price is said to be a reflection of its spiritual value. Yet the spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these is a living force, the art object, the 'work of art,' is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity."
Why do people travel for days to visit the Louvre to look at paintings they've already seen in photographs, on postcards, or on television? Most likely because the more an artwork is reproduced, the more famous and recognizable it becomes, stoking people's desire to see the original in person. Berger explains that, when artworks can be reproduced (such as in photographs,) this status is afforded to originals by a convoluted series of assumptions that eventually endow original works with a phony sense of quasi-religious value. The original work of art is valuable because it's unique—but value from scarcity is fundamentally derived from the market, and art is thought to occupy a rarified position that transcends economic forces. If this is the case, why do original artworks command such high price tags? Berger explains that this is because they contain some kind of abstract spiritual value, wherein society has collectively agreed to endow them with a special status. Some of this status might derive from their historical import, but ultimately, the value is as inexplicable and mystical, the kind of thing we usually attribute to religion. Given that religion isn't typically considered the governing force of modern society, Berger continues, the value upholding an original artwork can only be understood as a "bogus religiosity," a repressed and incoherent spiritual supplement to modern value. This "bogus religiosity" is the result of mental gymnastics that seek to uphold the original's value against a potentially infinite number of equally beautiful, even identical reproductions.
"Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."
Here, Berger puts forth an idea that would eventually become central to feminist media theory: society requires women to continually watch themselves, constantly conscious of their appearance, as this is the surface from which broader assumptions about their lives, habits, and personalities will be deduced. Men, on the other hand, are the surveyors: they serve as the imagined viewer for whom women must tailor their appearance, and wield the powers of image-making and representation. Notably, men claim an active role in this power relation, whereas women are passive, being looked at instead of doing the looking. Laura Mulvey drew heavily on this idea in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, analyzing how, in classical Hollywood films, women are figured as passive subjects exhibiting their "to-be-looked-at-ness," while men are empowered to look at them.
"Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity."
Like any medium, oil painting is associated with a specific style: lush, textured, tangible renderings of the objects it depicts. To Berger, this means that oil paintings are encoded with a certain worldview: because they privilege tangibility—they "define the real as that which you can put your hands on"—oil paintings endorse the logic of market capitalism and the privileging of wealth. While other mediums have been used to depict and create an aura of desirability around the physical signifiers of wealth, the tradition of oil painting, claims Berger, is uniquely suited to the illustration of lustrous, detailed riches. Berger points out here that oil paintings thus serve to make wealth visually desirable, furthering the power of the ruling class.
"From the tradition [of oil painting] a kind of stereotype of 'the great artist' has emerged. This great artist is a man whose lifetime is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself. He is imagined as a kind of Jacob wrestling with an Angel. (The examples extend from Michelangelo to Van Gogh.) In no other culture has the artist been thought of in this way. Why then in this culture?"
In this quote, Berger extends his analysis of oil painting to debunk the archetype of the artistic master that pervades most accounts of art history. By his assessment, the image of the genius male artist derives from the tradition of oil painting, which privileged a very specific kind of technical mastery: the ability to render objects, especially luxury goods, in rich and vibrant detail. Despite his technical skill, however, the artist is tortured: they lack the material means that they are so talented at depicting, or they are social outcasts or misunderstood geniuses. Indeed, as he points out, some version of this narrative seems to fit nearly every famous male artist of the Western canon. Berger poses a valuable question here: why do we insist on imagining the artist this way, when no other culture does so? Here, he gives us permission to imagine an alternate narrative of art history, demonstrating how something as seemingly simple as the choice of a medium can enormously impact a work's ideological content.
"Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more."
This quote, from the book's final chapter, departs from art history to explain a phenomenon that surrounds us in our daily lives: the publicity image, or advertisement. According to Berger, advertisements—and the system of market capitalism they're associated with—purport to increase our freedom by offering us choices. However, this choice is illusory: we are not given the choice whether to consume, only choices of what we will buy. The logic of consumption is underpinned by a promise that, by buying something, we will somehow change our lives: for instance, advertising promises us that by purchasing running shoes, we are buying health. While this may seem unrelated to the more historically-rooted analysis in the first three essays, Berger explains the effect of advertising images much like he explains famous paintings: both are ideologically coded, express a certain intention or political bent on account of their creator, and change in meaning based on the viewer's relationship to them. Most radically of all, by writing this chapter, Berger changes the publicity images' meaning: readers of Ways of Seeing can identify advertisements as a constructed promise resting on the illusion of infinite choice, allowing them to read advertisements against the grain and perhaps resist their pull.
