Chapter 1 of "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)
ways-of-seeing.com
ways-of-seeing.com
[1] https://pengpedia.org/edition/ways-of-seeing-john-berger-471...
https://cannonballread.com/2026/10/ways-of-seeing-carmen-ghi...
I think the fact that his work has been largely adopted by media experts, and is taught as dogma in film/media studies course work at the college level should be a strong signal that our ideas as a society about sex and body image are severely distorted and deeply problematic. Not in light of his work but because of it.
Authors like Mulvey have taken this as fact and used it to make claims about sexuality.
And society generally believes this stuff, at present. That's my experience, anyway.
You could look to Laura Mulvey, Lynda Nead, Naomi Wolf, etc.
Unless you think those fields were scientifically rigorous until they decided to adopt his ideas?
Maybe you just disagree with the existence of “male gaze”
I think maybe the feminist movements adopted his beliefs and repeated them infinitely to the extent that they've become as facts without any scientific basis. Regardless, I hear people regurgitating Berger-like beliefs in art museums around the world.
Male gaze, sure. (That's not Berger's btw. It's Mulvey using Berger beliefs. Great example.)
The idea that we can draw much knowledge about the owner of the painting of a fat woman, simply from the painting, is just not based in any science.
Hopefully that's more clear.
I minored in film/media around the mid 2000's and this was discussed in nearly every course.
John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.
I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.
Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.
Berger discussed the nude as a convention that tells you about ownership, power, and who the picture was made for.
Claude says that's chapters 3 and 5, so I'm fairly sure my memory serves.
That said, your summary is accurate. These claims aren't the primary topic of his work, so maybe I am being overly harsh on Berger.
Still, the claims have been influential. They do belong to him. And they've led to all manner of supposition about art, history, feminism, and human behavior.
Just because our education system does a poor job of teaching critical literacy doesn't mean other people aren't getting something out of this.
Great art is above and beyond such crude bracketing. Berger is part of the trend in western art since modernism that abandons beauty and the transcendent for dull ideology.
Just because the video games I grew up with were consumer products doesn't mean those experiences were somehow less important for my life or the people they connect me with.
Art doesn't just pop up out of thin air and the power relationships that affect our daily lives absolutely explains why the artists of a given time makes certain artistic choices.
If you'd rather preserve some kind of Romantic notion that art is somehow outside of the society that makes it then I guess that's your choice, but I'm not out here making much art for free now that I'm an adult with bills to pay just saying. Even the art I make free is with the goal of finding clients and absolutely a product of how that market is organized.
They were trying to absorb (and convey) the beauty and the often transcendent message of the painting. Of course, starting with modernism, elite culture's obsession with society and how bad it was meant that even the artists were mostly not aiming for beauty and an uplifting vision. This is where, in my opinion, it all started to go downhill for visual art.
Berger has a different focus specifically on critique because it's easy to look at the surface level of an individual piece without understanding who that art is made for and why that art is somehow valued above other art.
Especially as someone who didn't commission the piece to sit in my home and has no real relationship to these art pieces other than they're old, I find it helpful to understand how it was initially made and then how modern society treats it in continuing a value system that places certain art above others as more "worthy".
Frankly I'd argue he's critiquing the value system that would just off handedly say "virtual art has gone downhill" just because now it's more accessible and easy to create than ever
Why does ideology force Berger to diss their work and minimize how popular and well-liked they were? Because they showed ordinary people enjoying themselves in the first mass society in the world in ordinary everyday settings. But Marxism says ordinary everyday society is oppressive and the people ground down by a brutal capitalist elite. He can't get himself to understand that Western European everyday life of the late nineteenth century was the best life ever for ordinary people anywhere in the world or anywhere in history, and the fact that they were out happily enjoying it in a civilized urban way was a new thing in the world, and depicting that was an important advance in art.
I don't necessarily agree that in a vacuum you can really classify that as the best period ever in an objective way unless you have specific metrics, but also you don't really have to. Certainly it would've been an interesting time to be alive. I am actually intrigued in learning more about that period now I will say.
But I think the reason that Berger focuses on the critical class analysis of art is in the title. He's mainly focused on unpacking the way "fine art" gets valued and how/who those ideas of what is desirable, beautiful, etc were shaped. Then he ties that to the way the modern ruling class of his time used art to shape what is valued and desired with the tech/economic advancements at the time.
So focusing on the beauty of specific pieces wasn't really the focus of his work, as I imagine plenty of other contemporaries were already covering that.
As an artist I also don't think that it necessarily takes away from the art to acknowledge that what I make is shaped by my need to also make money and the markets they exist in affect that. I think it can be equally true that the impressionists were capturing nostalgic scenes of everyday life in a novel way that that people would want to buy, but that also was a product of people similarly working within what would sell in a market (which would be an advancement on previous conditions where people could even choose to pursue that kind of life which is revolutionary for the time).
He even acknowledges how his book is only the start of an analysis and it would be neat to see someone pick up this work not just from the perspective of the ruling class that commissioned the art but also the artists who made it and their stories. Obviously a lot of that gets lost with history though so that's probably harder to do.
Do blind people not have a place in the surrounding world?