In 1969, Kenneth Clark debuted a BBC miniseries narrating the history of Western art. Entitled Civilization, the series sketched out a concise, simple approach to art history, positing that every work of art can be understood by an adequate attempt to contemplate its meaning. Though its simplicity was appealing, not everyone bought Clark's approach—indeed, many progressive thinkers challenged it as reactionary. Chief among them was John Berger, who, three years later, premiered a BBC series of his own: Ways of Seeing.
In the series' first scene, Berger appears to challenge Clark directly: "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." Contrary to Clark's proposition that works of art contain a fixed, intrinsic meaning that can be teased out with enough thought on the part of the viewer, Berger advocated a more relational understanding of art, suggesting that the meaning of a work resides in the connection between object and viewer. As a result, an artwork's meaning will necessarily be different depending on where, when, and by whom it is viewed. Berger's Marxist-inflected proposition was groundbreaking, paving the way for numerous contemporary approaches in art history. Following the television series, Berger's insights were collected into a book, organized into seven essays. Three of these essays contain images alone, encouraging the reader to test Berger's insights by analyzing and interpreting the images themselves. These sections are radically open to interpretation, resisting the drive towards fixed meaning that characterized Clark's more traditionalist approach. In the years since, Ways of Seeing has become foundational to the fields of art history and visual culture. His writing on women's position in art history laid the groundwork for later feminist scholarship, and his resistance to any linear, easily-digestible narrative of art history empowered innumerable later writers. Its impact is visible on writers from Laura Mulvey to Frederic Jameson, crucially informing a generation of philosophers and art historians to come.
