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“The dream is always personal to the dreamer.” The “American Dream” has always been a bastion of freedom and pride in America. Essentially the more you can buy the more desirable you will become. Because self worth is tied to publicity so is a person’s lovability and thus in turn their sexuality. Publicity’s function is to make you dissatisfied with your current life and self and to strive to change that reality. The function of oil painting is to celebrate your current life and status with all of its amenities and luxuries. It wants to sell the past to the future.” Publicity would not work if it used a completely “contemporary language”, it must rely on tradition to appeal to the familiar and known to be superior ideals of individuals in society.Ĭolor photography works as a foil to oil painting in its own time.
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Valuing these mediums is a sign of your higher class and appreciation for the “finer things in life”. In John Bergers book Ways of Seeing, Chapter 7 he talks about glamour and envy, the promise that advertisements give, dreams of the consumers, and the distraction from everything going on in our society. An appreciation for art is to today’s culture what an understanding of the Greek myths and legends was to societies contemporary to oil painting. While we’re walking down the street or grabbing a cup of coffee we see a new advertisement appears. Oil painting and publicity promote the same ideals only the props have changed. Publicity makes the potential client envy his or herself as transformed by the product. The “absent, unfocused look” of so many models in glamour images appearing in countless fashion magazines is an example of how those who have achieved this supposed “happiness” are blasé and do not care that they have achieved it. Publicity is about social relations and depicting other people enjoying “happiness” (as deemed appropriate by the rest of society). “The happiness of being envied is glamour”. Publicity perpetuates the belief that you revolutionize your life by buying something. Bergner writes: It is seeing which establishes our place in. The author believes that the so called iconic signs are the best way to convey feelings and emotions. The idea of “publicity as a process of manufacturing glamour” explains (among other things) why there is a such a craze for celebrity and gaining your own fifteen minutes of fame by doing such ridiculous things as becoming “Octomom” or appearing on “WifeSwap”. The first chapter of John Bergers book Ways of Seeing, as well as the whole book, is penetrated with the idea that images occupy the central place in peoples life. Whether this might be achieved by buying Skippy instead of Jiff peanut butter is wholly up to you. These public images, wherever they appear, have come to represent freedom of choice and the new exciting “modern” world in which you have the choice to change your life in any way.
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We are so accustomed to this that we barely register the vast majority of these images. Images that either try to convince us to believe in or buy something are the images that we see most frequently.