John Berger: Ways of Seeing (1972)

Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

The book Ways of Seeing was made by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings. Ways of Seeing is considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history.

First published in the UK by the BBC and Penguin Books, 1972
Publisher Penguin Books, 1977
165 pages

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Mary Bittner Wiseman, Liu Yuedi (eds.): Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (2011)

What is art and what is its role in a China that is changing at a dizzying speed? These questions lie at the heart of Chinese contemporary art. Subversive Strategies paves the way for the rebirth of a Chinese aesthetics adequate to the art whose sheer energy and imaginative power is subverting the ideas through which western and Chinese critics think about art. The first collection of essays by American and Chinese philosophers and art historians, Subversive Strategies begins by showing how the art reflects current crises and is working them out through bodies gendered and political. The essays raise the question of Chinese identity in a global world and note a blurring of the boundary between art and everyday life.

Publisher Brill Academic Pub, 2011
Volume 31 of Philosophy of History and Culture
ISBN 9004187952, 9789004187955
417 pages

Publisher
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Boris Groys: The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1988–) [EN, IT]

“As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single “artistic” whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an “art for the masses.” Groys argues instead that the “total art” proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin’s death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing “sots art,” a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.”

Originally published in German as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, Carl Hanser, Munich and Vienna, 1988.

English edition
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1992
ISBN 0691055963, 9780691055961
126 pages

Reviews: Alla Efimova (Art Bulletin, 1992), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Slavic Review, 1993), Mary A. Nicholas (Slavic and East European Journal, 1993), Ross Wolfe (Situations, c2011), Giuliano Vivaldi (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2013).

Publisher (EN)

The Total Art of Stalinism (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1992, updated on 2012-7-18)
Lo stalinismo ovvero l’opera d’arte totale (Italian, trans. Emanuela Guercetti, 1992, added on 2019-12-14)