Not Feeling Too Creative.

Last week I read the book Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. I read through it briefly and found the text got lost due to the cascade of nude paintings, I think I have seen enough fat naked chicks to last me a lifetime. In no way am I under appreciating the art of painting and photography, I understand that's what people want to see, times haven't changed to much. Girls with luring eyes still cover millions of advertisements and fill the pages in dirty magazines. It was neat how he touched on the fact that back when photography was just beginning photographs were used to show what people already owned/had. What they wanted and what the painter possessed. The photo's helped accentuate their riches and possessions. Take for example the photo that was painted of young Rembrandt when he was with his first wife before she died. He was sipping alcohol and showing her off. He was young and careless with everything he could ever want. His age shows in a much classier, conservative, religious, and much older version of himself taken some years later with his second wife. Pictures were also painted to show off landscapes if you were a proud landowner ( Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Gainsborough, painted beside a cornfield, Berger explains that the reason for their background does not illustrate their love for nature, but that they are proud landowners). Those were the topics I was more interested in although he did speak of races and how children of the rich would be painted with their wet nurse, which I believe led into speaking of races and different ethnicity.
Today, magazines and advertisements show us what we need. The photo's brag about all the things that could make you glamorous and if you do not have 'said' possessions you are not, and will not be glamorous. He mentioned how it is more of a need for those things otherwise you feel useless. "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. " - both quotes by John Berger
Advertisements are used to make you feel like less of a person, because we measure ourselves on what we own and not as much who we are inside.



"The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be"- John Berger

http://home.surewest.net/jukes/SEEING.HTM
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jsa3/hum355/readings/berger.htm