Chapter 7 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger

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• stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation.

• It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.

• Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure.

• The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be.

• Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

• One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

• it implies that the purchase being proposed is both a luxury and a cultural value.

• The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt.

• feeling that he can almost touch what is in the image reminds him how he might or does possess the real thing.

• The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life.

• But in the sense that money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity.

• Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance.

• The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

• They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.