Based off of the BBC show of the same name, this book contains four written essays and two photoessays. I was expecting a sort of Art 101 type of text, which I would have welcomed, but instead I got something deeply thought-provoking and politically radical. I kept being surprised at how contemporary this work from fifty years ago still feels.

The first essay draws heavily upon the work of Walter Benjamin and his ideas of how our relationship to the image changes in the age of mechanical reproduction. Then he moves on to the nude and the objectification of women in European art which feels indebted to Simone De Beauvoir. The second half of the book critiques European oil painting as obsessed with possession, status, and objects and draws a line straight to our current moment of being inundated with ads as our main way of interfacing with the visual.

A line about advertisements stuck out to me, that as a form it is incapable of showing pleasure-in-itself since it would defeat the point of creating desire. He spells out how deeply destructive it is to be surrounded by these images that stir up envy and convert political activism to individualistic daydreaming. It is kind of unbelievable that the BBC funded this, it almost reminds me of Adam Curtis.