The Healthy and Happy Life Series by Jonathon Jones

It is hard to be optimistic about modern culture in the dawning age of Trump or to gleefully delight in the levelling power of the selfie. The democratic visual culture that Berger, or for that matter Andy Warhol, praised has given way to something much more manic, all-enveloping and violently irrational. If the 21st-century language of images means art has never been so widely loved, it also means that vacuous, deceitful, falsely seductive, grossly manipulative images have never bombarded our semi-conscious minds so shamelessly. Today, audiences for every kind of art, old and new, are as vast as our appetite for images is boundless. It cannot be coincidence that artists such as Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon and Jeremy Deller were to mix art and mass media in a “new language of images”. For my generation, the book was required college reading.

One of the reasons art has become so popular is that artists have learned the lesson of Ways of Seeing. Ways of Seeing quotes a range of statistics to show that only university-educated toffs went anywhere near art museums: those bleak 1970s figures now look very dated. High art, which he saw as a snooty, aristocratic preserve policed by his arch-enemy Lord Kenneth Clark, is infinitely more accessible than he anticipated. This has had some consequences Berger never guessed at.

The democratisation of the image that Berger welcomed in the era when David Hockney was painting A Bigger Splash has got so much bigger and splashier. As for postcards of paintings, today we are more likely to snap a masterpiece in an art gallery on our phones. Now, of course, it also means on Facebook, Instagram and the internet at large. The most uplifting thing about Ways of Seeing is Berger’s optimism about the age of the mass-circulating reproduced image, which, back in 1972, meant images in newspapers and magazines, on advertising hoardings and television. As in the death of a person, so in the decay of a society. When you have lost the power to speak, when consciousness is fading, there will still be faces surrounding the bed. Seeing comes before words – and after them. Within it we could begin to define our own experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us … If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Or, in Berger’s inspiring words: “For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. This is your own image world, in which you find your own meanings. Think of a pinboard where you stick your own favourite pictures, of all sorts, from magazine photographs to postcards of famous paintings. In 1972, Berger wrote that we are free to see images in collages of our own making.

The Healthy and Happy Life Series by Jonathon Jones