John Berger has died. The world is smaller.

The machine strains to domesticate dissent, to national-treasurise a rebel.

It would be too overt, too unsubtle, to censor the fact of his radical politics. The theoretical disembowelling must be subtler. Thus, 30 seconds into its short video obituary (second video), the BBC shows a clip from 1972′s Ways of Seeing.

‘Reproductions distort’, Berger says. The camera pulls him into view before a da Vinci. ‘Only a few facsimiles don’t. Take this original painting in the National Gallery. Only, what you are seeing is still not the original.’ He speaks more quietly. He turns from us to gaze at the painting. He sounds now as if he is at worship. ‘I’m in front of it. I can see it.’

That clip ends. ‘The programme’, Will Gompertz interrupts, ‘was to become iconic and highly influential.’ True enough. But it is surely not irrelevant that what we were allowed to see in that truncated clip was not the awed reverie at the power of art that it was made to appear: it was the set-up for its radical puncturing.

‘This painting by Leonardo is unlike any other in the world’, Berger continues in the original programme, as the camera lingers on the brush-strokes. His voice is hushed. ‘It isn’t a fake. It’s authentic. If I go to the National Gallery and look at this painting, somehow I should be able to feel this authenticity. The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. It is beautiful for that alone.’

And then, after a pause, the camera lurches to a close-up of Berger turning back to stare into it, his face now almost angry. He speaks assertively, making a mockery of his previous churchy tones, in a brilliant switch, one of the greatest ever moments of television. He speaks now with quizzical disdain. ‘Nearly everything that we learn or read about art encourages an attitude and expectation rather like that.’

This attitude of sentimentalism he immediately deguts as a mediated excrescence of capitalism. A work becomes ‘mysterious again’, might acquire ‘a kind of new impressiveness, but not because of what it shows, not because of the meaning of its image’, but ‘because of its market value’.

It’s been pointed out by many, including Berger himself, that it is impossible to imagine the BBC making Ways of Seeing now. That’s bad enough: it seems a particularly purulent symptom that in the BBC’s own obituary for the person responsible for one of the greatest works it ever broadcast, it in passing inverts the spirit and meaning of that work. Deploys it to reinforce the very attitude Berger was working so urgently to break.