Nothing New Under the Sun

Just finished an excellent book by essayist John Berger entitled Ways of Seeing. In it, Berger discusses 'publicity' imagery and it's ties to traditional painting. The reclining nude is a common theme. Berger's book is one that makes you evaluate what you see; questioning an image's motives and history.








I travel I-75 south every morning and within the span of a mile I saw two billboards that borrow from art history. I wondered if it was intentional or are these classical poses so ingrained in our minds that we just create these images unintentionally. I don't give people much credit and believe that they're not cultured enough to know Titian's Venus of Urbino. What makes me think that? The designers of those advertisements use that photoshop outer-glow with impunity.


Here's a bad photo I took of the second billboard on my route, an ad for a local IRL race featuring the young and attractive driver, Danica Patrick. Here, I juxtaposed it next to the Manet painting, Olympia.

Berger says:

"Any work of art 'quoted' by publcity serves two purposes. Art is a sign of affluence; it belongs to the good life; it is a part of the furnishing which the world gives to the rich and the beautiful.

But a work of art also suggests a cultural authority, a form of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest; an oil painting belongs to the cultural heritage; it is a reminder of what it means to be a cultivated person. And so the quoted work of art says two almost contradictory things at the same time: it denotes wealth and spirituality: it implies that the purchase being proposed is both a luxury and a cultural value. Publicity has in fact understood the tradition of the oil painting more thoroughly than most art historians. It has grasped the implications of the relationship between the work of art and it's spectator-owner and with these it tries to persuade and flatter the spectator-buyer."