Crazy like a crazy person

Watched the final section of Berger's Ways of Seeing and then Robert Hughes's doc on Goya last night; just to make a week of comparative art documentaries, I suppose. The final section was on advertising, and it left me with the suspicion I like John Berger so much so far because he says things I already thought, in a much more coherent way than I could say them - notably the sheer contextual madness of paging through a magazine between pictures of dead and dying third-world types and the warm fuzziness of hard liquor ads.

That sort of thing first struck me in a big way back when I was working at the television commercial place, watching 50 or more commercials a day, one after another. Especially watching the PSAs next to the other ads - a woman with black eyes gazing imploringly at the camera in the rain, or something of the sort, when it was aiming to boost donations for shelters or encouraging men not to beat their wives - and then a beer ad suggesting all the marvellous social and sexual things that would happen to a man if he got plastered that night.

The side effect of my job - and this happened to my predecessor in the position too - was not being able to watch commercial television anymore; not only was it infuriating and awful to be inescapably confronted with the fact of audience-as-commodity, but it was like listening to the pushier kind of madman, or a cacaphony of opposing, fanatic voices. Without even changing the channel. Thank god for internet streaming sites.

Anyways, profoundly enjoyed the whole Berger series, and the Hughes Goya: Crazy Like a Genius documentary wasn't too bad either, though I vastly preferred the book. I think that's partly because when you read the book, you don't have to listen to the lecherous snide fuck speak, and can let your eyes skim over the gratuitous sentences about what he'd like to do to the Naked Maja. In his documentary about Caravaggio and in American Visions and in the Shock of the New, I swear he wasn't so consistent about forcing himself front and centre, and that they're vastly better television for it. Somehow in the book, the extended part about the visions of Goya-ghouls during the aftermath of his road injuries was less obtrusive. I think it made more sense in the broader context of a kabillion-page book rather than an hour-long or whatever it was documentary.