## Metadata - Author: [[John Berger]] - Full Title: Ways of Seeing - Published: 1972 - Category: #books ## Highlights ##### Chapter 3: ###### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - relationship between the biblical myth of eve. Punished for the crimes of both Adam and Eve. Males continue to be the ones to deal out the norms and punishments for women, putting themselves in the role of God. - "You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure". Probably the most famous quote from the book. ###### Interesting Highlights - 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. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496453) ^rw304496453 - The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. VANITY BY MEMLING 1435–1494 You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496454) ^rw304496454 - To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496455) ^rw304496455 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496456) ^rw304496456 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496457) ^rw304496457 - One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496458) ^rw304496458 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496459) ^rw304496459 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496460) ^rw304496460 ### Chapter 5 - Adriaen Brouwer was the only exceptional ‘genre’ painter. His pictures of cheap taverns and those who ended up in them, are painted with a bitter and direct realism which precludes sentimental moralizing. As a result his pictures were never bought – except by a few other painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496462) ^rw304496462 ### Chapter 7 - 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 more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer – even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496464) ^rw304496464 - Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure’s own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496465) ^rw304496465 - The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496466) ^rw304496466 - Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496467) ^rw304496467 - Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it used a strictly contemporary language. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496468) ^rw304496468 - The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt. Publicity makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical dimensions. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496469) ^rw304496469 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496470) ^rw304496470 - Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred. How then does publicity remain credible – or credible enough to exert the influence it does? It remains credible because the truthfulness of publicity is judged, not by the real fulfilment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer. Its essential application is not to reality but to daydreams. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496471) ^rw304496471 - Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496472) ^rw304496472 - The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496473) ^rw304496473 - Note: Politics of envy seems true to those who do not fight for power because for them its true? - It is this which makes it possible to understand why publicity remains credible. The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496474) ^rw304496474 - The interminable present of meaningless working hours is ‘balanced’ by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment. In his or her day-dreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496475) ^rw304496475 - Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496476) ^rw304496476 - 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. (Page 0) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496477) ^rw304496477 ### Chapter 1 - When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. (Page 5) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496438) ^rw304496438 - Note: You are not meant to fully find the words.. - We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach – though not necessarily within arm’s reach. (Page 5) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496439) ^rw304496439 - If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue (Page 6) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496440) ^rw304496440 - Every image embodies a way of seeing (Page 6) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496441) ^rw304496441 - History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. (Page 7) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496442) ^rw304496442 - The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. (Page 7) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496443) ^rw304496443 - Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident. (Page 11) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496444) ^rw304496444 ### Ways of Seeing - Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera – and more particularly the movie camera – demonstrated that there was no centre. The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them. (Page 14) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496436) ^rw304496436 - 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. (Page 15) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496445) ^rw304496445 - Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified (Page 15) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496446) ^rw304496446 - 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. (Page 16) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496447) ^rw304496447 - 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. Works of art are discussed and presented as though they were holy relics: relics which are first and foremost evidence of their own survival. (Page 17) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496448) ^rw304496448 - The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so. (Page 19) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496449) ^rw304496449 - By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. The issue is not between innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. (Page 27) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496450) ^rw304496450 - The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life – precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve. (Page 27) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/304496451) ^rw304496451