The Seminal TV Series That Changed How We See

The BBC miniseries Ways of Seeing opens with a close-up shot of the British art critic John Berger standing in front of a large framed painting—Botticelli’s Venus andhanging in a museum. “This is the first of four programs in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting,” Berger intones in voice-over. On-screen, he pulls a box cutter from his pocket and begins slicing into the painting. As he removes the face of Venus, the hole left behind reveals a blue wall where the back of the frame should be; we have not, in fact, been looking at the wall of a museum, but rather, a rudimentary set constructed inside a recording studio. This visual doubles as a concise summary of the show’s premise: In art, and in life, things are rarely as they appear.