This book comprises seven essays, four with words and three with only photographs, and is based on a BBC series led by Berger, a leftist art critic, essayist, and cultural commentator who was a major influence on Geoff Dyer among others.  The book is an occasionally grating but often penetrating critical analysis of art and its history in the face of the rise of capitalism, property, wealth, and the power that accrue to those who have them.  The first essay drawing largely on the work of Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is the most dense and obtuse arguing that the original image through mass production had lost its uniqueness and authority in an attempt to make art available to the masses. Art has been replaced by images.  Subsequent essays on women (the surveyed and the surveyor) and the distinction between naked and nude, on the emergence of oil painting between 1500-1900 as a means of indicating ownership, property, and power, and on the congruence between publicity and capitalism.  One brief quote will give you a flavor for Berger’s style: “Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.  This was once achieved by extensive deprivation.  Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.”   Heavy sledding for those capitalists among us readers!