Ways Of Seeing Chapter 3 Summary

In this essay, I will discuss chapter’s five and seven of John Berger’s book “Ways Of Seeing”. Section one will look at what Berger means when he talks about power in chapter five of the book. In section two, we will discuss his ideas on imagination and envy, as outlined in chapter seven.

In chapter five, Berger talks about oil painting being more of an art form than a technique. While he concedes that the technique has been with us for centuries, his argument is that it came into prominence when people, mainly the upper classes, wanted to portray a style of living, one that was prosperous. Painting up until this point mainly advocated religious beliefs, but with a change in social climate and the rise of capitalism this changed. He states that “this is a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form.” (Berger, p87, 1972). With the aid of oil
Whilst he makes connections with oil painting, he mainly talks about how in his opinion, advertising works. He claims that advertising can only work if it plays on the consumer’s imagination. In that advertising never shows the present, it only shows an illusion to stimulate memories or daydreams of “what if”. “Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell” (Berger, p132, 1972). The most obvious example being the national lottery ads stating, “it could be you” while showing someone relaxing on a sun drenched beach. A French Marxist philosopher named Louis Althusser would seem to back up this idea as shown in John Storey’s book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. His concept of the “problematic” claims that a text would always portray one thing but would tell another story by what is not said or