The Modest Female Nude
One art-historical trope that Berger skillfully unpacks is the "modest" nude female. Renaissance art in particular, with its emphasis on biblical stories such as the tale of Adam and Eve, tended to depict naked women (alongside men), privates neatly covered by well-placed fig leaves. The women in these paintings aren't ashamed of their nudity in relation to their surroundings—they appear to be modest in relation to the spectator. As the tradition of painting female nudes developed, modesty—or lack thereof—became a way of signaling the values or intentions of the women being depicted. Some female nudes are self-consciously modest; others are aware of their provocative immodesty as if winking to the spectator. In either case, however, their status is determined in response to an imagined viewer: in short, female nudity is always self-aware, and a woman's morality can be inferred from how she appears to respond to being seen naked. This, as Berger points out, is obviously sexist: while men are endowed with a certain confrontational power, the painted woman "is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her." In this sense, an imagined (male) spectator is baked into the painting itself, encoding the male-dominated relations of a certain era into the very work of art.
The Luxurious Oil Painting
One of Berger's central propositions is that a seemingly innocuous choice, such as the choice of what paint to use, can have ideological consequences. Oil painting is a clear example: because its rich texture is well suited to depicting luxurious, expensive goods, oil painting formed a representational tradition that emphasized the value of these expensive objects, and, by extension, market capitalism. Consider the velvety, deeply pigmented, highly detailed physical objects in any historical oil painting: the beauty of their representation valorizes them, making the acquisition of material goods seem extremely desirable. In this sense, the oil painting is figured as a kind of antecedent to the modern advertisement, emphasizing the glamour of acquiring more objects.
The Unique Original
Another central motif that Berger debunks is the rarefied, valuable original work of art. Although, in this era of reproducible media like photography, no artwork is really "unique" (in the sense that there will inevitably be innumerable pictures of it floating around—we've all seen photos of the Mona Lisa even if we haven't seen the physical painting in person), original artworks are still thought to have some unique value. Paradoxically, this is especially true of works that have been reproduced a lot, because they are more famous, lending an almost religious value to the rare originals. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Berger suggests that this uniqueness is illusory: and although a high-quality reproduction could look even better than an original painting, the original commands higher market value due to some rarefied status that's essentially imagined. Berger, after Benjamin, advocates for the destabilization of this imagined uniqueness by endorsing mechanical reproduction as a way to democratize art, offering broader access and increased possibilities for interpretation.
The Glamorous Advertisement
Another art historical trope that Berger addresses will certainly be familiar to all contemporary readers: the "publicity image," or advertisement, which tells us that we will be happier than before if we buy a new product. In this sense, advertising is essentially the process of manufacturing envy—and to be envied is to be glamorous, explains Berger. So while we may know, on some level, that buying a hot new product won't necessarily make us as happy as the people in the advertisements appear to be, the visual language of advertising appeals to our sense of envy to encourage us to keep purchasing.
Renaissance Perspective
Another convention that Berger addresses at some length is perspective. During the Renaissance, it was discovered that, by painting physical space so that it appears to recede into a point on the horizon, a more "realistic" image results. Since the perspective is fixed, these works presuppose a single, fixed spectator—a way of seeing the world that, if you think about it, is actually not that realistic at all. Rather than reproducing the way we actually move through the world, perspective assumes a fixed, godlike spectator—another paradox, given that the religious beliefs of the time dictated that God was omniscient and all-seeing. Like oil painting, perspective represents a convention that wouldn't seem to be ideologically coded, but in fact is: perspectival paintings appear to bring the world before the spectator, affirming a Cartesian worldview.
