Scrungle Gungle’s Reviews > Ways of Seeing > Status Update

“Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (wears,drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world. Publicity adds up to a kind of philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets the world.

“Money is life. Not in the sense that without money you starve. Not in the sense that capital gives one class power over the entire lives of another class. But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity. The power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless.”

“Pubilclty 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 this 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.”

Hmm. I’ll need to revisit the essay on oil painting I think. My initial reaction is to find it a bit aggressively charged against the medium over so-called (or perhaps real) bourgeois pretension but I am willingly to have my mind changed.

“From the tradition a kind of stereotype of "the great artist" has emerged. This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself.”

“The formal portrait, as distinct from the self-portrait or the informal portrait of the painter’s friend never resolved this problem. But as the tradition continued, the painting of the sitter’s face became more and more generalized. His features became the mask which went with the costume. Today the final stage of this development can be seen in the puppet tv appearance of the average politician.” Uh, no.

“… a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”

Hmm. Maybe.

“But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the ’ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”

“Here and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman’s body helps towards the same end. Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion. Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”

“In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and be is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there, it is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger - with his clothes still on.”