Ways of Seeing is a 1972 art documentary by the maverick art theorist John Berger. A four-part series broadcasted by the BBC, Berger’s Ways of Seeing was one of the earliest articulations of the concept of the male gaze, and includes a groundbreaking analysis of wealth in oil painting, where Berger argues that part of the reason we like art is for the pleasure of possessing and owning. He argues that paintings are “themselves objects that can be bought and owned,” different to music or novels in that they’re unique. At least in the time of oil painting, there was only ever one copy of a painting in existence – one physical object – and you could make it yours. You could take ownership, display it in your house as a marker of your purchasing power, your ability to buy and own. “Many oil paintings were themselves simple demonstrations of what gold or money could buy. Merchandise became the actual subject-matter of works of art.” People bought art, he argues, and continue to buy art into the modern day as a symbol of status. It was a confronting perspective at the time, but today it’s very much part of our conceptual furniture – we all know about the millions and millions of dollars spent in the fine art market on these vanity purchases by billionaires. That perspective can be traced back to John Berger.

When I was introduced to Ways of Seeing in college, it was framed as a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, another art documentary from 1969. Civilisation is a thirteen-episode survey of European art and architecture, laid out as a sweeping tour of Europe’s cultural achievements. It’s very much an establishment perspective – the sort of thing made by people who come up with a title like ‘Civilisation’ and then only talk about white people, as if their achievements were the only ones that rose to the required level. It’s also accompanied by a book, Civilisation: A Personal View, which opens with Clark defending his show against early criticisms. He’s basically mad that people saw the title of his show and immediately figured out what sort of show it was. “I didn’t suppose that anyone would be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.” The title wasn’t meant to imply that Europe is the only civilisation, he claims. He’s been misunderstood. He just didn’t have space to fully communicate his intention. There was nothing he could have done across three years of filming to come up with a better title.

Structurally, Civilisation is built around the conflict between civilisation, so-called, and barbarism. Clark doesn’t immediately define those terms, but based on the examples he picks, it seems that civilisation is what white people do and barbarism is everything else – no, wait, sorry, I’m being obtuse. These are obviously loaded, racialised terms, and Clark deploys them in an uncritical way. If we were trying to be as generous as possible, we might say that ‘civilisation’ refers to a certain communal spirit, a sense that collectively we can reach heights greater than the sum total of our achievements in isolation. We talked about this idea with reference to James Suzman’s Work: in order for our world to function, we need to have surplus labour beyond the effort required to feed everyone. If we can spare people to write music, to dance, to build skyscrapers – it’s a testament to the fact that we’ve secured our basic biological needs. There’s something decadent about art, in that sense. Having the time and leisure to build up an artistic community – having people available to carve instruments, to learn to play them, to sit around and listen in the audience, to teach them to the next generation – there’s something celebratory about that, especially as those traditions are cultivated across hundreds or thousands of years.

I’m trying to put a positive spin on Clark’s arguments, trying to make them seem at least a little bit palatable – his actual ideas are much worse. He associates civilisation specifically with permanence, with the monument. He describes barbarism as nomadic, referring to “barbarian wanderers” and “invaders” in a “continual state of flux,” who lack any sense of the future: “they didn’t feel the need to look forward beyond the next March or the next voyage or the next battle. And for that reason it didn’t occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books.” This framing is straightforwardly racist. Clark has been raised to value some cultural forms over others. He labels the qualities he recognises in his own culture as ‘civilised’, and the qualities he sees in non-white cultures as ‘barbaric’. Working within that framework, Clark is often unable to appreciate the strengths of other cultures or practices. Books, for instance, are not inherently the best form of communication. There are plenty of advantages to oral traditions. They don’t require as much storage space as books. You don’t need light to use them. They can’t be stolen, they’re easier to transport, less vulnerable to damage from damp, rain, fire, termites. When you tell someone a story, it’s duplicated in the telling. There are plenty of complicated reasons why you might favour one type of tradition over another in certain contexts (stone houses sound great until you’re living in earthquake-prone Japan), but Clark is committed to his predetermined markers of civilisation. He can’t get past that surface level. He’s trained to associate certain things with the racialised labels of civilised and uncivilised, and, starting from that end-point, simply asserts – well, isn’t it obvious? Many of his distinctions between culture and barbarism, in the broad view, come down to that simple sort of assertion. On comparing an African mask to the Apollo of the Beldevere, he declares “I don’t think there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask.” The Greek statue is civilised, born of “a world of light and confidence”, while the tribal African mask comes from “a world of fear and darkness”. He’s had those views bred into him, and he can’t get past them – which is how he’s ended up writing a book about civilisation that only draws on white examples.

That’s not to say that the book is a hack job, or that it doesn’t have any value. It’s still a reasonable survey of European art and culture. He makes some interesting connections – for instance, he compares the Renaissance as a culture of the image, citing the great painters of the era (like Michelangelo and Raphael), against the Reformation as a culture of the word, citing Luther’s translation of the Bible into the common tongue. He specifically draws out Luther as a transitional figure, exploring the iconoclasm that saw Luther’s followers destroying stained glass windows, statues, and other images. That destruction marks a neat turning point from Clark’s discussion of Renaissance painters to Reformation writers – from image to word, from Catholic to Protestant, from Michelangelo to Shakespeare. He also observes that the mountain only emerges in art as a site of awe in the Romantic era, in the 1700s (“for over two thousand years mountains had been considered simply a nuisance”), and he’s good on the difference between Turner and Constable (Constable is invested in the “cult of nature”, while Turner’s method “consisted of transforming everything into pure colour”). Some of his ideas are of course very silly (he argues that the Virgin Mary emerges as a theme in art to counterbalance the masculine energy of the Crusades), but this is not the work of a maniac. He’s a garden variety toff.

And if that was all – if we were just talking about a sort of smug patrician routine – there wouldn’t be all that much to say. The darker aspect is in how Clark’s framework of civilised vs uncivilised functions to uphold and justify colonial violence. When art is used as a marker of civilisation, it’s often quickly repackaged as evidence of the superiority of Western civilisation, excusing violence towards any foreign, lesser peoples. It might be sad that some natives died, but they were a lower sort. They didn’t rise to the level of Western civilisation – no books, no stone houses. No Shakespeare. Their deaths can be sad, but never an indignity. In Chapter 11, for instance, Clark talks about the colonisation of Tahiti:

“The student of European civilisation may observe that Polynesia produced no Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton or Goethe; and although we may all agree that the impact of European civilisation on places like Tahiti was disastrous, we must also allow that the very fragility of those Arcadian societies – the speed and completeness with which they collapsed on the peaceful appearance of a few British sailors followed by a handful of missionaries – shows that they were not civilisations in the sense of that word which I have been using.”

In the first instance, simply on the facts, this framing is incorrect. The arrival of the HMS Dolphin in Tahiti in 1767 was not peaceful: it ended in cannon fire, with the British destroying Tahitian canoes and bombarding a group up on the hills. In the apocalyptic years that followed, European settlers wiped out a staggering 90% of the Tahitian population, primarily through diseases like syphilis, influenza, and tuberculosis. Estimates of pre-colonial population vary, but are potentially as high as 200,000, dropping precipitously to 16,000 by 1797. Clark makes out that the problem is the inherent fragility of Tahiti’s culture, as if on gently bumping into another civilisation it immediately collapsed. He uses as evidence this idea that Tahiti didn’t have any powerful artistic output. They didn’t have any great works, which means they must have had a weak civilisation, which means that obviously they imploded at the slightest gust of wind – a few sailors and a handful of missionaries, in Clark’s telling. Clark frames the destruction of Tahiti not as a consequence of dirty Europeans and their bastard plagues but as the inherent weakness of Tahitian culture: the problem with that framing, obviously, is that a society’s artistic output isn’t predictive of their immunity to tuberculosis.

Throughout his book, Clark bangs on about how great art is an expression of civilisation, part of the uplifting of the human race. Shakespeare and Goethe carry us forward, bringing us closer to enlightenment, to peace, to a more tolerant, humane, decent world. What we see here is his shadow-view that a lack of great art (or what Clark considers art) is equally expressive of degeneracy, backwardness, barbarism and savagery. It indicates weakness, instability. How can you expect to survive influenza if you don’t have a tradition of frescoes? In reality there’s no inherent connection between these things. It’s a retrospective justification, papering over the carnage in favour of the supposed uplifting of the human form. Eyes on the winners; pay no attention to the bodies by the wayside. It’s not a mistake that this book about civilisation only talks about the achievements of white culture. Whiteness is at the heart of its vision, the metric by which civilisation is determined. The weakness of Tahiti in Clark’s framing is that it wasn’t white enough. They didn’t produce a Shakespeare or a Goethe, so they weren’t civilised. They didn’t have permanence or strength. They were doomed to die. Things couldn’t have gone any other way.

I don’t know. You try to write about some goofy aristocrat’s art history and it turns out to be rationalising the destruction of indigenous peoples. What’s left dangling in this analysis is the art itself. It’s one thing to point out that Clark uses it to heinous ends, but we’re not left with anything better. Berger’s economic arguments in some ways feel like they devalue the artistic project. The economic angle is of course an important part of the history of art, and Berger is right to raise the issue, but if your take on Beethoven begins and ends with the profit motive, it feels like you’ve lost sight of the spirit of things. Wealth can be part of the culture of oil painting without being all of it.

In accounts of Tahitian art forms, particularly dance, one thing that comes through is the sense of pride and resilience that it’s survived, even through the horrific effects of colonization. It is, again, art as celebration. Still here, still going. It might not be the whole picture, but maybe it’s a place to start.