ABSTRACT
John Berger's Ways of Seeing achieved its goal of breathing new life into art historical debates and making it easier for the wider audience to study visual culture. Ways of Seeing became a key work in cultural studies, art history, and visual studies, and its ideas have had a tremendous influence on art history since the 1970s. In Ways of Seeing Berger focuses his criticisms on Western art and the tradition of European painting. Berger's system of analysis carries its own limitations though. Ways of Seeing unveiled something that had always been there but remained under the veil of traditional scholarship and art criticism. One other important aspect is that before the publication of Ways of Seeing, most of Berger's ideas had already been included in the BBC television series of the same name aired in 1972.
