Ways of Seeing - John Berger

Episode 1



Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Andrew Graham-Dixon's exhibition walkthrough: 7 min 35 sec, one take

www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/citizensandkings

Towards Crash

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads."

- J. G. Ballard, 1995