And from there- what constitutes “the exceptional”? The obvious answer is: skill, imagination, and morale. Within the world of oil painting comes the comparison of “the average” versus “the exceptional” artists. Artists where considered agents and laborers at one point- expendable and paid to paint exactly and solely what their patrons mandated. Painting or art as a commodity has been held higher than all other possessions and finery like clothes, plates, cutlery, furniture…etc because of its ability “to speak to the soul”. Art, rather than music or literature, is also expected to be on display. You can display them and reap the praise and accolades that come from having such good taste as to own such finery. You can own paintings in a different way than you can own poems and music.
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The textures and objects that the spectator can associate with touch are superior and more meaningful than symbols like a skull, for example. The vivid and highly realistic textures that are often on display in oil painting also promote this obsession with “owning”. Until then, oil painting was the most superior medium in which to create visual images. It used to be the principle source of visual imagery until photography (specifically color photography) replaced it. Oil painting as a popular art form lasted from about 1500 to 1900. This ties in with Berger’s earlier analysis on rarity and what exact variable gives art and paintings their “value”. With the advent of oil painting “art” itself became more of an object and something you were able to own. As life got better people learned to value material objects more and more which was paralleled in popular and contemporary art. This development in art mirrored what was going on socially, agriculturally, and technologically in Europe at the time. The move away from religious art to humanist celebrations of the triumphs of mankind also gave way to the glorification of the “possession”. Let that not, though, diminish Berger's achievement in highlighting what is a very clear gender bias in European art.The concept of reinforcing the importance of objects and materialism through oil painting is explored in Chapter five of Ways of Seeing. These factors interplay in subtle ways, meaning that the icons of visual culture will mean different things to different people at different times. Overlaying this is the way visual culture is perceived by an audience.
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The whole is rather more than the sum of the parts we must see the artist in isolation (as with the Edvard Munch example previously) but also the artist as part of a wider society.
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Is a theory of the way of seeing actually telling us much about the work itself? Berger presents the portrayal of nude women in some of the works he highlights as 'feeding the appetite' of scopophilic male viewers but that seems too sweeping a generalisation not all viewers will see it that way (even if it was intended) art works are not simply a product of society, any more than they are simply a product of an artist. The ideological approach says much about Berger, but does it say much about the works of art he uses in his argument. The approach is prescriptive rather than descriptive (Howells and Negreiros, 2012). It is then that Berger's work is seen as polemical rather than analytical. The problems arise when one stops to think about what one does with the conclusion. Berger's treatise is the more effective for being straightforward with direct and lucid use of language. Berger lays bare the implied sexism in the art of the nude from Renaissance onwards, and we have seen this has not changed, perhaps even less subtle than in previous generations. At one level it seems almost uncontentious now as much of contemporary visual culture openly objectifies and debases women, as described in the post Gendering the Gaze.