“Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it used a strictly contemporary language” (139). Okey doke.
“Cigars can be sold in the name of a King, underwear in connection with the Sphinx, a new car by reference to the status of a country house. In the language of oil painting these vague historical or poetic or moral references are always present. The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lesson half-learnt. Publicity makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical dimensions” (140). This is amazing and ever-fascinating.
“Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the spectator- owner” (140). Every time photography is mentioned I am sure to take notice.
“Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred. How then does publicity remain credible- or credible enough to exert the influence it does? It remains credible because the truthfulness of publicity is judged, not by the real fulfillment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer. Its essential application is not to reality but to daydreams” (146).
“Glamor cannot exist without personal social envy being common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion” (148). So the notion of glamor was the result of more or less, a self-obsessed consumer culture?
“The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent daydreams” (148). I was aware of this before, but now there is no denying that Berger is using a Marxist theory to evaluate and think of art. This is both good and bad. It’s good because I often tend to think of the world through “Marxist glasses” and it is bad because I would like to eclectically view art. However, when one reads a book, one should be aware that it may be (highly) opinionated.
Ways of Seeing ends with, “Publicity is the life of this culture- in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive- and at the same time publicity is its dream. 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 it is and what is not desirable” (154) and a painting entitled “On the Threshold of Liberty.” Because this is the ending it makes me wonder if the main point of the book is that capitalism is bad. This is not at all the ending I expected. I thought it would end with something about how one should look at the world when viewing it.
This ending makes me wonder if Ways of Seeing is [socialist] propaganda. I don’t mean to sound as if because it was mentioned often in the end that I can get nothing else from reading this, because that’s false. Maybe these ideas of capitalism is just one way of seeing and I should be aware of that. I completely agree with the quote above. It makes complete sense considering that we live in a consumer culture. I guess it’s impossible to look at visual culture without considering publicity; which comes into play because of capitalism. It’s all interconnected.
