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How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

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Review

“Readers will be grateful to have wise, witty Beard as guide and companion... Beard is charming and insightful piece by piece.” - San Francisco Chronicle“The title of the book?How Do We Look?could also refer to the physical quality of the book itself. Its design, use, and style harken back to the concise, entertaining, well-made, solid little books popular a few years ago. In that, Beard again explores a means of perceptions (and a practical meaning of educating)… If your summer vacation proved a disappointment, make this little book your consolation.” - Robert S. Davis, New York Journal of Books“Slim yet insightful.... Beard expands her view beyond western Europe to offer an admirable survey of cultures from Egypt to China, Judaism to Christianity, centuries past to the modern era, all while emphasizing the significance of the viewer over the artist.... As Beard emphasizes the power of the context in which we look at and interpret art, she ultimately suggests that civilization itself is a leap of faith. Beard is having fun in this joyfully accessible primer, backed with a robust appendix, for all interested in a new perspective on religion, art, and history.” - Katharine Uhrich, Booklist [starred review]“The renowned classicist delivers another tantalizing morsel of analysis, this time on 'art, and our reactions to it, over thousands of years and across thousands of miles'.... Yet another triumph for Beard: a joy to read, too short for certain, packed with lessons quickly absorbed.” - Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

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About the Author

A professor of classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling SPQR and Women & Power and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

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Product details

Hardcover: 240 pages

Publisher: Liveright; 1 edition (September 4, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1631494406

ISBN-13: 978-1631494406

Product Dimensions:

6.1 x 0.9 x 9 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.5 out of 5 stars

10 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#73,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This is an extremely political book on art history by a professor of the classics. In particular its an attack on Kenneth Clark and the well known BBC documentary "civilization". Her lines of attack are rather predictable. Clark is too patrician, he is too focused on European matters, he excluded underrepresented people (in particular women), created a vision of art where the only women present were "society hostesses" and "the virgin mary" (p.207). She hates the narrative of "one damn genius after another" she says he represents. She outright says that Clark saw the work as superior europeans and inferior barbarians (p. 207). She is so political that she cannot even trust that herself looking with her "white western gaze" at art outside Europe She offers him backhanded praise at the end but at the same time carefully explaining to us that she was only 14 years old when he saw it and of course not understand all its various flaws.While Kenneth Clark attempted to create a narrative covering western civilization which he clearly said at the time was a "personal" narrative, Mary Beard offers sort of random tourism lacking any real narrative at all aside from constant repetition that she is a being of a higher morality than a Kenneth Clark and has a superior understanding of the world. Nothing really ties the pieces of the book together aside from her constant complaints about dead white men and her complaints about a selective group of cultures.Often in the book, she is speaking outside of any expertise that she has and often offering blue-sky opinions about matters which are not her subject area. There are also what to me are rather ugly and stupid statements. On p. 117 for example, she presents to the reader the idea that the destruction of religious artwork on religious grounds is "far more than brute vandalism" and that it "may indeed reflect an artfulness of its own". For all her virtue, she doesn't understand that many people would not tend to see it that way. That when one goes to certain historical sites and sees heads broken off statues or thousand-year old paintings on a wall scratched out with swords/knives, that it represents a tragedy and bigotry rather than a style of art. While she looks with contempt at her imagined evil white men, she seems to see glory in religiously imposed restrictions on what art can be.She demands that we see the story of Islam's historical conquests and destruction of art in places like India as a more "nuanced" history. That while they were carrying out a wave of destruction, they were at the same time fascinated by what they were destroying. That when they were looting art and carrying it out of the countries, that was really "appreciation" of it. She talks about how the art defaced in a Hindu site converted to a mosque has been valued through its "re-use" and that the humanity of the art still comes through in the broken pieces. She offers the same view on sites smashed historically by iconoclastic movements in Europe.While she sees smashing, defacing and destroying art as a form of artistic expression, she is almost overtly hostile to classical european art in the context of greek and roman works. She sees those praise those sculptures and other works as :"offering a ready-made standard against which to judge the art of other cultures - sometimes a distorting and divisive lens which is hard to escape.". In other words, liking classical european art is the same as attacking the art of other cultures and being "divisive".To me, that is incredibly simplistic. She would have made a valid point in perhaps 1910, but I'm not sure today who exactly she is talking about. Who looks today at non-European art simply through the lens of classical greek art? And are we to blame and shame an entire artistic tradition based sometimes on the opinions of people who lived in the 1700s? And what would we find if we applied those same standards to the art of other cultures? The author doesn't really believe in uniform standards. For example, she praises an ultra-modern mosque in Turkey for its "feminist" reform of allowing women to stand segregated in the mosque to the side of the men rather than as traditional behind the men. One can look at violence and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar today and see that Buddhism can be be driven by ethnic hate and extremism as much as any group in Europe.. All this begs the question of double-standards and if the author's tendency to apply different standards to different traditions isn't simply a new form of what she calls "western gaze" but directed toward self-loathing rather than self-superiority.There are no end of problems with the book. She speaks out of her depth often and offers what amounts to a tourist view of things she doesn't understand. She is political in a constant, nagging sort of way. She has no narrative to speak of other than being a derivative counterpoint to what Clark called his personal view. And while she is critical of Clark for his presentation of "one genius after another" she is guilty to a degree of presenting people who fit into diversity narratives one after the other.Overall she would have done much better to come up with her own narrative and personal vision of art rather than disrespect and ride on the backs of others. She also needs more discipline and organization as a writer. As in her book from a few years past on Rome, there seems to be a tension between producing a conventional book and producing something overtly political to impress her friends. In general, she wasn't the right person for a book like this. Quite frankly none of the three people selected by the BBC to do the new version of "civilization" had the necessary background in the appropriate material. The whole thing illustrates the problem that the people who have the greatest contempt for someone like Kenneth Clark are still unable to better than he did back in the 1960s.

Very enjoyable ,easy read w high education factor. Could have been a little longer.

Mary Beard is a very thoughtful observer of modern human culture. Her SPQR is her best work, but this new book offers many multi-dimensional observations about world art not often thought or spoken by a single author. Well done.

A silly book without content. A money grab by a formerly highly respected classicist.

I rather enjoyed Mary Beard's "How do we look". It's a pretty fast-paced overview of various art objects throughout history (not connected in any particular way other than Mrs. Beard's line of thinking, it seems, which doesn't make it any less interesting), all the while raising a ton of "meta" questions along the way. If you're a serious art history buff then you won't find it too engrossing unless you are especially interested in this the author's opinion ; however, if you're just an interested reader with an open mind, this book proves to be hugely entertaining and makes you go "Ah, yes! I forgot about this place!" and deep in thoughts about it you go...Some views of the author can be a bit out there for a conservative reader (but I appreciated her down-to-earth view on certain things), so it's important to keep an aforementioned open mind. In the end, it is her take on the subject. It's very amusing, however, to find an unexpected outlook on something and think about the way this conclusion was made."How do we look" will take only a few hours to read (plus time to think about and/or discuss things - the controversial story about Aphrodite led me to some interesting debates). It's full of photographs of art pieces or places, sometimes long forgotten (it's always a pleasure to re-discover the beauty of a certain work you never got to see in person and filed in the back of your mind for later); and it is by no means presents itself as a monumental work on art history. It seems that it was written more as a thought-provoking entertaining non-fiction, mostly for those who have interest in art, human history and like to ponder on things.Happy Reading!

I recently re-watched the original 13 part series Civilization from 50 years ago. Twice. Its fantastic! It is of course 50 years behind some of humanity’s greatest scientific accomplishments, particularly archeological & historical, but it is a well articulated masterpiece of one man’s vision. I have since watched the new Civilizations series several times as well. Not bothering with the dumbed-down American version, but absorbing the much richer original BBC version. And, it is as fantastic as its predecessor! I especially appreciate the depths Professor Beard takes us. In the episodes and in this book, she makes what could easily have been a dalliance with pretty objects into revelations of their importance. Her intellect and expertise is a gift to us all. I recomend this book whole heartedly. (As I recommend the many other books she’s written). And having been fortunate enough to have seen most of the objects she describes with my own eyes, I recommend visiting them as well. As she points out, they have a lot to tell about us.

Beautifully imagined and thought out, with a multitude of examples and fresh perspectives about art and women (in art, history, and society). I felt compelled to buy it when, reading an article about it in NYT today, all the interviewer asked Beard was her opinion about Instagram photos of modern pop stars and the Royal Family!

Ms Beard has written a simplistic book with no coherent point of view. I was embarrassed for her - her photos of herself alongsidevarious works of art made her book look like a tourist's guide rather than a serious intellectual effort. The book lacks depth andI was left none the wiser after having read it.

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