In the late-twentieth-century television program
Ways of Seeing (1972),
John Berger proceeded from and developed the themes of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), to explain the contemporary
representations of
social class and
racial caste inherent to the politics and production of art. That in transforming a work of art into a
commodity, the modern means of artistic production and of artistic reproduction have destroyed the
aesthetic, cultural, and political
authority of art: “For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free”, because they are commercial products that lack the
aura of authenticity of the original
objet d’art.