Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art)

I started this book's bbc docu-series but I decided that I am not competent enough to remember some useful information for a long time without taking actual annotations so I opted for the book based on the series and I am very glad I did. Tbf I am not very knowledgeable about the interpretation of fine arts in general so I found a lot of relevant info from this book which influenced me to think more critically about these. Among all of these, I found the most interesting point to be the difference in usage and interpretation of male/female sensuality with respect to nude painting

the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura. To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

And how women's presence solely exists for the default 'male gaze'

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman’s self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman’s presence regulates what is and is not ‘permissible’ within her presence. Every one of her actions – whatever its direct purpose or motivation – is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Berger dates the origins of the said objectification dated back to the biblical interpretation of Adam and Eve's paradise lost

What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

He also contradicts the depiction of nudity between classical western art and other lesser known art tradition

It is worth noticing that in other non-European traditions – in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre-Columbian art – nakedness is never supine in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other.

Now another aspect he pointed out was the influence of modern visual ques of marketing strategies which strive on our insecurities and our desire to lead an ideal life which being absorbed in consumerism and self-sabotaging

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.

Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.

Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless. Those who have the power become lovable.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

4.5/5 stars
would've loved to read more on the colonizer-colonized art interpretation.

By and large, I'm not a fan of manifestos. This one was no exception. It had a lot of insight, as manifestos often do, and I learned a lot from it, which is also not atypical. But to my mind, there's something insulting about a manifesto. To borrow a metaphor from Eudora Welty, writing like this is the equivalent of serving me my brain food already cut up for me. The ideas may be deeper than a trashy romance novel (for example), but the level of respect for the audience is roughly the same. And I always tend, right or wrong, to begin judging the ideology in question through the lens of that disrespect. If they have this much distrust for people in general, then how can their ideas about life not be tainted with that fundamental distrust? Since I do not share that distrust, how much am I really going to accept the ideas they've built on it?

All of that is the case, as I said, with manifestos in general. So what about this particular one? Ways of Seeing, the book, is apparently based on a BBC series of the same name and with the same purpose. Their purpose is to get us to look at art in a different way (namely, and being a leftist myself I don't throw this term around lightly: in a Marxist way). They begin with a very simplistic explanation of the importance of sight (based, apparently, on the fact that we are able to see before we are able to do just about anything else—never mind that we actually start using all four of our other senses before we even open our eyes), and then go on to the importance of visual art: painting, photography, that kind of thing. Then they leap straight into the Marxism and attempt to show the ways in which art, especially painting, has always been used to promote capitalism (even, it seems, before there was capitalism) and to celebrate the virtue of the propertied class. Some of which is interesting, actually, but some of which is stretching quite a bit. In true manifesto fashion, they make sure to consistently point out the ways in which seeming exceptions actually prove the rule. Also in true manifesto fashion, they are careful to pick the most egregious examples they can find in order to make their points without looking like they picked the most egregious examples available.

I have to include one quote, because I think it's so emblematic.

We [the authors of the series/book] are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is.

Or, to put it another way: "We're rubber, you're glue. Bounces off us and sticks to you." They're right about the nature of obsession, I'm sure, but that isn't much of a defence since their own argument could be described with that sentence.

Here's the thing, though. There's a lot of value in the book. I actually do have a new way of seeing art now, and I think it's a better informed way. I also have a more complex understanding of some other issues, ranging from the nature of masculinity to the nature of history to the nature of envy and beyond. All of which is good, and all of which is despite the fact that this isn't my first exposure to many of these ideas. I got this book on a recommendation from a prof in grad school, and in his class and others I did think about & discuss many of these ideas. But the value of a manifesto, I suppose, is that (since they almost completely disregard opposing viewpoints) they can really succinctly get deep into the ideas at hand. So there is a lot to be gained from a book like this. Even if I didn't particularly enjoy reading it.

P.S. I must say something about the design of this book. It's horrible. Really, absolutely terrible. Take a closer look at that cover image (click on it and look at the large version). The text on there is actually the beginning of the book. It's repeated again inside, but I guess they thought they'd look more serious and utilitarian if they just started right in with the cover? This book also suffers from the same ridiculous modernist notion (later completely disavowed by Jan Tschichold, who started it) that sans-serif fonts are better than serif fonts because they are free of the "adornment" of serifs. They take it one step further here, and use a bold sans-serif throughout the book. Which is just dumb. Many of their other design choices (full one-inch paragraph indentations, for example) are equally dumb, and the book looks like it was thrown together in half an hour by a high-school journalism class. Really, it's just atrocious.

P.P.S. The book ends, and I'm not kidding, with a page that has one line on it: "To be continued by the reader . . ." The absolute pretension at work here was almost more than I had the stomach for.

The topics are still valid. Unfortunately, at a higher level …