Ways of Seeing

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” John Berger made this claim in 1972 when he published a thin, but a hugely influential book called Ways of Seeing. This course intends to bring Berger’s statement – and the insights of his book – to bear on our own experiences of art, history, and visual culture in the early 21st century. An introduction to the history of art and visual culture, this course considers local and global case studies that implicate images, image makers, and viewers. These are explored according to themes that cut across historical and geographical boundaries, themes that include, but are not limited to visual culture and ideology, beauty and art, the female body and the male gaze, iconoclasm, piety, and religious spaces, museums, popular and consumer culture, and social change.