Publicity Is the Art of Capitalism
Another deep dive into Ways of Seeing by John Berger.
Hello!
I’ve returned from my brief jaunt to Maine where I ate copious amounts of seafood and accidentally sunburned the hell out of my legs during an overly cocky early morning stroll down the beach. I am now back home in rainy Brooklyn and reunited with my beloved terrier Francine who I swear is getting cuter by the day. I also published a new YouTube video yesterday that I hope you will behold at your leisure:
But I’m not just here to plug alternate platforms upon which to consume my content. I’m here to once again regale you with some interesting tidbits we’ve been reading and talking about in my Ways of Seeing book club in the hopes that it might spark some deep thoughts in your domes as well. Specifically, I wanted to chat with you about John Berger’s argument that publicity is the art of capitalism and that it operates in very much the same way that European oil painting once did before ultimately being supplanted by the invention of the camera.
In chapter five of the book, Berger explains that the European tradition of oil painting was born out of a desire to display one’s possessions via yet another aristocratic possession, the work of art itself. “If you buy a painting you buy also the look of the thing it represents,” he writes. “Before they are anything else, [paintings] are themselves objects which can be bought and owned…They show [the collector] sights: sights of what he may possess.”
He then quotes anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who writes that Renaissance paintings were only possible “because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.”
Berger explains that the rise of this merchant class with its disposable income and this “way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found is visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form.” He continues, “Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth — which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy.” And so, oil painting became the artistic medium through which capitalism expressed itself.
This medium didn’t just shape our relationship to our own possessions, but also, as we talked about in my last essay on this book, it “forms many of our cultural assumptions. It defines what we mean by pictorial likeness. Its norms still affect the way we see such subjects as landscape, women, food, dignitaries, mythology. It supplies us with our archetypes of ‘artistic genius.’”
The European tradition of oil painting being born out of, and inextricably linked to, this period that also gave rise to capitalism instantly reminded me of something I read in Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists.