Advertisements constantly persuade us to spend our money by positing that we will be transformed by the act of purchase: spending our money will make us "enviable." Ads manufacture glamour by conveying the happiness of others who have what we desire, capitalizing on our sense of envy to convince us that we, too, will be glamorous (which is essentially the same as being enviable) if we buy what they have.
However, we can brush these contradictions aside because publicity is generally justified under the assumption that it benefits the public, informing consumers so that they can fully exercise their freedom of choice.īerger questions this definition of "freedom": within a culture that privileges publicity, we are free to choose which products to buy, but we are not free to choose not to buy. For example, advertisements are always of the present in the sense that we engage with them in a particular moment, but their content almost always refers to the past or future. We accept the existence of this system as readily as we accept the climate around us, even though it's rife with contradictions. But at least momentarily, any ad that we look at does a kind of work on us: they make us want to buy things. Often, we don't really take in all the ads that we see we pass by them, they pass by us, they may not really register. Subjects include iconic religious figures, dead bodies.Turning now to the modern world, Berger sets aside the previous discussion of oil paintings to look at advertising, or "publicity images." These images proliferate, surrounding us more densely than any other kind of image at any previous point in history. The chapter begins with religious reproductions of paintings by Cimabue in 1240, and continues the gamut of representative art and artists through the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, ending with Magritte in 1967. Paintings of the artists whose works are identified illustrate a virtual history of art. Many of them are also acknowledged for their owners' permission to reproduce.
There are a total of thirty-six images, all of which are identified in the List of Works Reproduced. There are no words used to describe the images but many of them list the title, dates, and artist of the work along their left side border.
Chapter four is a sixteen-page chapter comprised of reproduced images whose originals are oil paintings, and one apparent photograph of the Knole Ball Room.
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