22xxxx Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing

 

p10

Every image embodies a way of seeing. (...) An image became a record of how X had seen Y.

 

p11

Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: 

Beauty
Truth
Genius
Civilization
Form
Status
Taste, etc.

 

Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. (...) Out of true with the present, these assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. (...)

 

p19

The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

 

p131

Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.

It is true that in publicity one brand of manufacture, one firm, competes with another; but it is also true that every publicity image confirms and enhances every other. Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and t his car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. 

This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. 

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.