Reading the book “Way of Seeing”
In modern society, publicity images and other visual messages have in common than in the past. There are many advertisements images around us, and we can see many wall image signboards, many posters, etc. People now realize that publicity images as part of the environment and our life.
There are many advertisements examples for explaining publicity celebrates the future buyer and the glamorous life in the book. Page 132 includes an alcohol advertisement showing groups of people enjoying drinks in their favorite places. Berger says that publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. In the video, he compared envied people to powerful administrators. He also mentioned that publicity is manufacturing glamour than looks, but it depends upon them. Glamour works through the eye and the mirror. Personal envy is a less familiar emotion, and without social envy, glamour cannot exist. Envy becomes a common emotion in a society that has moved towards democracy and then stopped halfway, where status is theoretically open to everyone but enjoyed by only a few. I was interested in his idea in the video because of the development of social media; it is easy to compare around people and can envy them. But Berger also mentions that publicity also works on our anxieties about money.
Moreover, he believes the language of publicity connects to the language of oil painting. On page 135, he said publicity images often use sculptures or paintings to lend allure or authority to their message. Art is a sign of both wealth and European cultural authority. What makes art so useful to an advertisement, Berger argues, is art’s ability to portray the contradictory values of “wealth and spirituality” simultaneously. In the video, Berger mentions that sometimes works of art give prestige to a publicity scene. In the past, oil painting tried to show a medium especially developed to render the physical texture and tangibility of things on canvas. Today color photography performs a similar though color photography oil pint. Publicity and oil painting use many references and celebrate the same qualities in things that share many ideals. However, the mediums differ because the spectator-owner of oil paintings and the spectator-buyer of advertisements are different audiences. Oil paintings are designed to show a standard of living their wealthy owners already enjoy. Advertisements are designed to show potential buyers what their lives lack and offer them a better life.
Look to the 152 pages, Berger’s contrast between advertisements that white women in a suburban home and serious happen to Pakistan can be shocking. The contrast can be shocked morally through the advertisements. Berger says, is the fact publicity exists in an eventless future. Real events don’t happen in the world of publicity.
On the last page, Berger ends with the paragraph, “Publicity is the life this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream. And he also said, “to be continued by reader …” indicates that Ways of Seeing is meant to be a starting point.
ART & DESiGN JOURNAL 