Summary
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. 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. But at least momentarily, any ad that we look at does a kind of work on us: they make us want to buy things. We accept the existence of this system as readily as we accept the climate around us, even though it's rife with contradictions. 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. 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.
Berger 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. 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. Since ads can't offer us the actual pleasure of the thing they're selling—an ad for the world's best steak is still just a piece of paper, and can't literally facilitate the pleasurable experience of eating that steak—they rely on a hypothetical future transaction that will bring us a kind of pleasure completely divorced from real life. This pleasure could be described as the joy of being envied by others, or the state of being glamorous. As you can see, it's far more abstract than the actual pleasure or usefulness of a real thing to be enjoyed. When we look at an ad, then, we are made to envy our hypothetical future selves—ourselves as we would exist if we were to buy the product.
Berger briefly returns to his discussion from Chapter 5, positing a fundamental relationship between ads and oil paintings. For one, advertisements often quote or reference oil paintings, in order to lend themselves an air of cultural authority or luxury. Interestingly, these two values are actually opposed to one another: cultural value is thought to be almost spiritual, independent from the vulgarity of quantifiable transactions, yet luxury is by definition the domain of wealth.
But the relationship between ads and oil paintings runs even deeper: they share a similar visual language, which Berger vivifies by reproducing a series of oil paintings side-by-side with a series of ads. Both use similar symbols—female sexuality, the ocean, the "exotic"Mediterraneann, romantic nature—in their address to the viewer. Berger suggests that this is not coincidental: oil painting is fundamentally a celebration of private property, making it the ideal predecessor to publicity images. Advertising is fundamentally nostalgic: since it can never fulfill its own claims, it must instead sell you a glorified image of the past. In this sense, advertising recalls the historical genre of oil painting, as Berger discussed in Chapter 5. Publicity images capitalize on the average buyer's fleeting familiarity with art and history, borrowing famous symbols to lend credibility to its images of glamour.
The continuity between advertising and oil painting is further explained by one particular technical development: the invention of inexpensive color photography made it possible to reproduce images of objects in extremely realistic depth and texture, much like oil painting famously did in eras past. However, the spectator of an oil painting was historically likely to be its owner, who already boasted enormous wealth, whereas the spectator of an ad is likely to be a common person, both worker and buyer, caught up in the promise of trying to acquire wealth.
The purpose of ads is to make us dissatisfied enough with our current life that we'll buy something, which also helps to explain why the interior spaces of the very rich are often devoid of publicity in a way that the outside world rarely is. Advertising relies on our anxiety that, by buying nothing, we will be nothing, feeding the idea that money is the constitutive building block of all human relations. It promises a future in which we are glamorous, but this future is endlessly deferred. This notion of glamour is unique to advertisements, and did not yet exist at the time of oil painting: oil paintings may show their subjects as wealthy, beautiful, or loved, but they inevitably lack the contemporary sense of glamour that derives from being envied by others. Perhaps this is because they occupied a different place in society, reifying the power of their already-wealthy viewers rather than engaging with the everyday citizen.
Advertisements make it seem as though the whole world is available to the consumer—but, in doing so, they also flatten the world, rendering everything similar, as everything is universally available in a marketplace. It produces a vision of a life beyond conflict, because it always takes place in the future or past. There are no "events" in advertising; the narrative of an ad is replaced by our imagination of what we will feel like when we finally own the thing. This helps explain why it's so jarring to see ads next to important or serious news stories: the world is filled with events of which ads are inevitably devoid.
With all these factors in mind, the power and influence of advertising are made extremely clear: all needs, desires, and social relations are subsidiary to their power to make us consume. All hopes are consolidated and made similar, simplified so they can be catered to by an ad's play on our imagination. This is the logic of capitalism: the only imaginable satisfaction is the satisfaction of consuming.
Analysis
After spending most of the book discussing paintings, which we primarily encounter in specialized spaces like museums, Berger shifts the focus towards advertisements in Chapter 7, which, as he points out, confront us more frequently than any other kind of image. In contemporary capitalist society, the concentration of images is denser than ever before—and a large number of these images are "publicity images," or ads, meant to sell a product. Sometimes, it feels as though we're surrounded by such a large number of ads that we can hardly process them all. But nevertheless, they register on our consciousness, even if briefly: as Berger puts it, "the publicity image belongs to the moment," momentarily affronting us as we walk down the street or turn the pages of a magazine. Similarly, they "belong to the moment" in the sense that they must constantly be re-thought and updated. Anyone who's ever watched the Super Bowl can speak to how true this is: advertisements constantly try to appear and be with the times by featuring social media trends, contemporary political slants, or the recognizable celebrities of the moment.
Yet, there's a contradiction implicit in the fact that advertisements "belong to the moment": their images often refer either to the past or the future. However, this strange contradiction often goes unnoticed as we passively accept the presence of ads surrounding us, moving around us like the weather. This state of being surrounded by publicity images is usually justified under the premise that it helps consumers stay informed about the litany of products that they might buy—in effect, making possible our freedom of choice and freedom of enterprise. This, as Berger observes, is why images of cities illuminated by ads and neon signs are often taken to symbolize "The Free World." However, this freedom of choice is illusory: consumers are offered the choice between which products to buy, but we don't really have the choice not to consume at all. As Berger puts it, "publicity as a system only makes a single proposal": that we are fundamentally incomplete, and can only enrich our lives by buying things to complete ourselves—that buying more things, despite making us literally poorer, will somehow also make us richer.
So how do publicity images convince us of this ultimately false transformation? This is how the earlier contradiction, about advertisements being "of the present" but frequently referring to the past or future, comes in: ads show us people who have already apparently been transformed by the act of consuming, and, resultantly, ought to be envied. "The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour," writes Berger, "and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour." Sure, there is a certain pleasure to be had by buying and using or experiencing something that we want—but advertising images don't deal in this realistic pleasure. Instead, they deal in a hypothetical future pleasure that we might attain by buying what they tell us to, making us acutely aware that we lack that particular pleasure in the moment we see them. In this sense, publicity offers the prospective buyer "an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell." When we see an advertisement, we project ourselves into it, imagining the happiness we will feel when we have our new thing, and furthermore imagining the envy that others will feel towards us, made newly glamorous by the acquisition of something exciting. In this sense, advertising images rely on social relations to execute their mission of making us consume.
Although this desire to be envied is socially relational, being envied is solitary--it depends on posessing something exclusively, or "not sharing your experience with those who envy you." This, says Berger, explains the absent, distant faces of models in so many glamorous ads: "they look out over the looks of envy which sustain them." When we look at these ads, we are meant to envy our hypothetical future selves: we imagine ourselves transformed by the product for sale, envied by others. To rephrase, Berger offers a compelling aphorism: "the publicity images steals [the buyer's] love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product."
Berger then posits a connection between advertising images and oil paintings. Often, this connection is explicit, such as when ads reference famous paintings, or center on reproduction and pastiche. By including well-known or historically important artworks, advertisements hope to lend credibility to their own messages. By "quoting" famous art, ads denote affluence, but furthermore, they bolster their own association with wisdom and dignity. Herein lies another contradiction: an artwork referenced in an advertisement simultaneously denotes spirituality or cultural heritage (values typically thought to be opposed to materialism) and wealth. But the relationship between ads and oil painting runs even deeper: Berger points out that publicity images rely heavily on the visual language of oil painting. He interrupts the essay with a series of pictures, showing oil paintings and advertisements side-by-side. Beyond their striking formal similarity, they share a series of common aims and devices: the gestures of their subjects, romanticization of nature, innocence, the exotic, stereotypes of women, sexual emphasis on female bodies, luxurious materials and textures, the ocean, men gesturing to denote their power and virility, perspectival distance, alcohol, and men in cars and on horses.
Why do they share such a long list of common devices? Berger returns to his earlier discussion of oil painting to help explain this: fundamentally, oil painting was a celebration of private property, deriving from the principle that you are what you have. Publicity is essentially nostalgic, relying on references to the past to obfuscate the fact that the products it sells can never live up to their own claims. This sense of nostalgia is effectively accomplished by referencing the kinds of art history that the average spectator might have learned about in school and come to associate with wealth and luxury. These vague, glamorous references, "cultural lessons half-learnt," turn history into myth, masking the inadequacies of the present. Thus, publicity images need a visual language that is historically informed, making oil painting an ideal analog. Finally, the invention of cheap color photography made it easy to reproduce the tangibility, color, and texture of objects—precisely the tactile lustre that, previously, only oil painting was able to capture. Both color photography and oil painting appeal to the spectator's sense of acquiring the actual thing that the image refers to, by eliciting the feeling that the object pictured is real enough to be touched.
However, the "spectator-buyer" of advertisements occupies a much different subject position than the "spectator-owner" of oil painting. Oil paintings served to consolidate the owner's own sense of their own value by showing the wealth they already enjoyed, embellishing and vivifying the luxury of the way that they already live. Advertisements, on the other hand, work by making the viewer somewhat dissatisfied with their life as it exists at present. This is because they rely on the promise of a better alternative, which will easily remedy dissatisfaction for the small cost of a new product. While oil paintings were for those who had already made money on the market, ads are for those who constitute the market, both as workers and buyers. Berger elucidates this opposition by pointing out that the only places relatively free of publicity images are the domains of the already rich.
Publicity relies on anxiety. It posits that to have money is to overcome anxiety, and instructs us to be anxious about having nothing and, by extension, being nothing. To have and spend money is to access every human capacity, says Berger--"the power to spend money is the power to live." This sense of power is always in the future tense. And yet, the achievement of some future state in which we have overcome our anxieties and are finally glamorous, as promised by publicity images, is endlessly deferred. So, then, why do we keep buying things even when we know, on some fundamental level, that the promise of future power is a lie? Berger suggests that this is because the truthfulness of an ad is judged by the relevance of its fantasies to the spectator's own. As long as ads continue to successfully fulfill our daydreams, they don't have to be true to reality.
This returns us to the discussion of glamour that Berger began earlier in the chapter. He claims that glamour is a modern invention—that, even in the heyday of oil painting, there was no such thing as "glamour" in the way that we now understand it. Sure, there were grace, elegance, and authority, but these are all still different: the subjects of oil paintings are not presented as enviable, necessarily. Their qualities are their own, and are recognized as such: these subjects can be beautiful, wealthy, fortunate, et cetera, but that isn't quite the same as being calculatedly enviable and therefore glamorous. That is because these subjects do not depend upon others wanting to be like them. Warhol's portrait of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, depends on the envy of others to constitute its glamour in a way that oil painting never did.
Advertising images collapse the world by bringing it all before us: everything is on offer, available for our consumption. And, since everything is imagined to offer itself to us, everywhere is essentially the same. The world is flattened and made to appear free of conflict, because "to live beyond conflict" is understood as the highest form of sophistication, Berger says. Even images of revolution are appropriated for advertisements, stripped of their radical politics and made to appear fun and glamorous. Hence, there is a stark contrast between the sanitized conception of the world that advertising offers us, and the world as it actually exists. This is extremely evident in magazines that print news stories: images of global trauma and horror are reproduced alongside warm, promising publicity images, to quiet the jarring effect. This juxtaposition is so disarming because publicity images are essentially devoid of events: because it must take place in the past or future to capitalize on our sense of envy, publicity must be situated outside the present, excluding all narrative development. The act of acquiring something replaces any other event that might take place in the temporal logic of an advertisement—in essence, the exact opposite of the news. Here, the shortcomings of a culture saturated with publicity images become extremely clear: ads recognize nothing besides the power to acquire and consume. All hopes are gathered and instrumentalized under the mantle of consumption, reducied to a simple equation: buy this, and you'll be happy. Amidst the cynicism of constant war, violence, and tragedy, the satisfaction of consuming is the only kind of satisfaction that can be envisioned. In this sense, ads impose a false sense of what is or isn't desirable, shoring up the future of capitalism by forcing the population to define their interests as narrowly as possible—in this case, within the requirement that they continually consume.
