I hope you will consider what I arranged, but be sceptical of it.’ you receive images and meanings which are arranged. Meanwhile, with this programme, as with all programmes. For that to become possible in the modern media of communication, access to television must be extended beyond these present narrow limits. The images may be like words, but there is no dialogue yet.
The first part of the series starts with Berger cutting up Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars, and ends with Berger speaking straight into the camera, warning: ‘But remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproductions needed for these programmes. He is a charismatic speaker who talks directly to his audience, patiently explaining his ideas, mercilessly demolishing the bourgeois idea of art. In the series, Berger, long-haired, his shirt open at the neck, set against a blue background void of books and other symbols of knowledge, acts as the author, presenter and iconoclast.
Ways of Seeing was first broadcast by BBC in 1972, as a four-part TV series.
He diverges from Benjamin significantly, however, in that while Work of Art is written in a style which at times is rather convoluted and inaccessible for those not initiated into the mysteries of art criticism and philosophy, the language of Ways of Seeing is conversational and easy to read. Like Benjamin, Berger raises questions about hidden ideologies in visual images and explores the idea of art as commodity. Berger builds some of his arguments on Walter Benjamin’s seminal book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.