Several of the chapters in Ways of Seeing are essentially explainers for other, more complicated works. Gender politics, the role of the visual in abetting capitalism, colonialism’s special investment in that role: He whistle-stops past them all. In this small work, Berger gives a basic primer on the complicity of the European art tradition from 1500 to 1900 with the politics of the same period. Berger takes his readers beyond the visible, towards a closer understanding of the world as it really is-the one capitalism, patriarchy, and empire try to hide from you. Berger points out that the globe hovering behind Holbein’s The Ambassadors refers to incipient empire and so to racist violence. European conventions on perspective, he argues, offer the world up to the covetous viewer with a deference found in no other tradition. He tells us that still-life painting did not depict objects qua objects, but as items to be owned.
He explains the difference between the painted nude-seductive, objectified-and the naked human being. In fewer than 200 pages, Berger whips the curtain back on contemporary advertising’s roots in European oil painting. It is very short, for one thing, and it moves very quickly.
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