Ways of Seeing (book)

Ways of Seeing was made as a response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, and its four thirty-minute episodes and hundred-and-sixty-page book performed a precise critical operation: they took the European oil painting tradition down from the wall, stripped it of the mystifying language of art history, and examined it as a record of specific social relations between owners, makers, and subjects. The book's arguments on reproduction, the female nude, the aesthetic of possession, and publicity became the foundational vocabulary for generations of subsequent work in cultural studies, feminist art criticism, and visual theory. Its method — sustained looking, the refusal of reverence, the insistence that every image carries a politics — is the method this volume extends to the polished surfaces of AI.