Since ads can't offer us the actual pleasure of the thing they're selling-an ad for the world's best steak is still just a piece of paper, and can't literally facilitate the pleasurable experience of eating that steak-they rely on a hypothetical future transaction that will bring us a kind of pleasure completely divorced from real life. Advertisements constantly persuade us to spend our money by positing that we will be transformed by the act of purchase: spending our money will make us "enviable." Ads manufacture glamour by conveying the happiness of others who have what we desire, capitalizing on our sense of envy to convince us that we, too, will be glamorous (which is essentially the same as being enviable) if we buy what they have.
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However, we can brush these contradictions aside because publicity is generally justified under the assumption that it benefits the public, informing consumers so that they can fully exercise their freedom of choice.īerger questions this definition of "freedom": within a culture that privileges publicity, we are free to choose which products to buy, but we are not free to choose not to buy. For example, advertisements are always of the present in the sense that we engage with them in a particular moment, but their content almost always refers to the past or future. We accept the existence of this system as readily as we accept the climate around us, even though it's rife with contradictions. But at least momentarily, any ad that we look at does a kind of work on us: they make us want to buy things.
Often, we don't really take in all the ads that we see we pass by them, they pass by us, they may not really register.
Turning now to the modern world, Berger sets aside the previous discussion of oil paintings to look at advertising, or "publicity images." These images proliferate, surrounding us more densely than any other kind of image at any previous point in history.
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