Ways of Seeing by John Berger was written in the early 1970’s as a companion to the BBC television series (available on YouTube) of the same name. This book was a fantastic way to introduce deeply common and yet important factors that relate to how a designer “thinks” about his/her design. The thinking in question can be subconscious or blatantly apparent in their individual approach to the use of design properties such as contrast (tonal or sizes), perspective, sex appeal, and sometimes-fanciful escapism. The first four chapters are nicely balanced to illustrate the key points around the topics (perspective, tone, and mysticism were all covered in the early chapters).
Mysticism was an early takeaway lesson I garnered from the book. If memory serves me correctly, I already had a vague grasp of the concept Berger explored involving mysticism and its involvement in the “deterioration” of the original work after it has been copied repeatedly. “Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is” wrote Berger. In the book he used DaVinci’s Mona Lisa as an example of a painting that has lost the intended mystery, due to over reproduction. This may have been true at the 1972 publication, but is it true today? Dan Brown in a sense re-mystified the painting and artist with his DaVinci Code book. This act caused the world to look again at DaVinci as well as many other renaissance artists for clues to secrecy. Did this act detract or add to the mystery of the original painting? I have never seen the Mona Lisa in person, but friends have seen it and been confounded by its presence. They have reportedly felt ambivalent to the original, because of the actual size or hype and mystery surrounding it. I think actually the Mona Lisa could serve as an exception to the loss of mysticism rule. Over time the painting has continued to baffle experts and commoners alike.
Near the end of his book, Berger really began to speak to me clearly and concisely in a way that has spoken true even after thirty years of publication. As a last though Berger begins to explain the corollary between past classics and modern advertising. Berger purports and I agree that most modern advertising is either reminiscent or directly representative of old oil paintings have created a new type of art called publicity. Publicity is act of creating the mundane into expressive and at times extravagant portrayals of the “real world”.
The biggest aha moments taken Berger involved his examination and explanation of publicity as an art form. Some of the common themes he sees in advertising that also appear in oil paintings are “The man as knight (horseman) becomes motorist”, “the equation of drinking and success”, The sea offering a new life”, “sex-object (Venus, nymph, surprised) etc”, as well as many more but I see these four models more than any other. You can view these four models in one specific type of advertising, sometimes all four are include in one commercial. Automobile commercials are some of the most expensive, analyzed, and scripted advertising campaigns. “You are what you have “ (Berger p139), “the purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life” (p142), “the gap between what publicity actually offers and he future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be”(p148), “Publicity is the life of this culture-in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive-and at the same time publicity is its dream” (p.154)
All those quotes serve to illustrate my example of the car commercial. When I watch television, and a car commercial appears it drives me nuts. Almost all cars portrayed on television are silver, black, or off-white/silver hues much like the knights of oil paintings. Mazda, Oldsmobile, Acura, Cadillac are considered luxury item cars, and nearly all are driven on wide open roads in a forest, mountains, desert, or an inexplicably empty sea coast road. This imagery serves the “new life” in a new car purpose, portraying that in this new car you are untouchable by society and are essentially free to be your own man/woman. Cadillac had an excellent mix of the “knight”, “sex-object”, and “success” themes in commercial involving Kate Walsh and their CTS-Coupe. The car was silver, Walsh drove in high heels while speaking a monologue about leaving the bar/diner from a “power meeting” and “surprising the boys with her car’s power”. Finally nearly all car companies have tried to replicate the “you are what you have” theme in their advertising both in print and digital formats. Each company purports that their car is the best, and the most envious of your neighbors and friends.
