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thevampiremars's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0
Ways of Seeing is an accessible yet insightful introduction to art criticism, with musings on the nature of art, subjectivity, capitalism, hierarchy, ownership, sexism, glamour, advertising, and more. I always enjoy being introduced to new perspectives on topics familiar to me. I liked, for example, the section about Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors. I was familiar with the memento mori aspect of the weird skull, but I hadn’t considered that if it had been painted the same way as the other objects in the picture it would have been reduced to just another belonging instead of a symbol of death.
I appreciated the essay about sexist portrayals of women in art, including that iconic and influential quote “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity.” Yet I’m curious that Berger uses generic “he” throughout the book (with two exceptions I picked up on; a “he or she” towards the end of the book, and generic “she” used when referring to shoppers). I feel like this is something he should have been more mindful of – he had some really astute insights regarding sexist assumptions but he neglected to examine his own biases, it seems. There was also one point where he referred to male and female sex categories as “unquestionable reality” and I know this wasn’t intentionally exclusionary but I’m trans and it did kind of sting.
I did really enjoy Ways of Seeing overall though, and I almost gave it a rating of four and a half stars but in the end I had to knock it down to a (high) four. The main let-down isn’t the writing, it’s that the images are grainy and greyscale – in my copy, at least – which makes them difficult to make sense of. This is especially frustrating in those “purely pictorial essays” where the images are supposed to speak for themselves without the need for accompanying text. How can I analyse an image if I can’t see what it is?
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content
Minor: Death, Sexism, and Suicide
Depiction and discussion of nudity (I'd say it's moderate rather than graphic)