Advertising is a glamour manufacturer, powered by social envy, according to the late John Berger. “Envy becomes a common emotion in a society which has moved towards democracy and stopped halfway, where status is theoretically open to everyone, but enjoyed by only a few,” the critic said in the final part of his Ways of Seeing series for the BBC in 1972, which looked at parallels between fine art and publicity.
Berger’s 45-year-old analysis of the fracturing impact of social inequality — and advertising’s role in it — sounds right up to date in the new post-truth era of Brexit and Donald Trump.
In many other ways, though, his critique is a quaint throwback to a more innocent age. Modern marketing can be much more insidious, invasive and hard to identify than the posters and display ads he studied.