Seeing comes before words. It is seeing that establishes our place in the surrounding world, a fact that words can never undo. Yet the way we see is shaped by what we know and believe. An image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced, and every image embodies a way of seeing. But today, we see the art of the past as no one saw it before. The invention of the camera shattered the uniqueness of the painted image, detaching it from the place it was made and sending it out into the world. When a camera reproduces a painting, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.
The original work of art, in this new age of reproduction, is no longer primarily valued for what it says, but for what it *is*: a rare and authentic object. Its spiritual value is confused with its market value, and it becomes shrouded in a bogus religiosity, a holy relic whose survival is its primary message. This mystification obscures the past. It prevents us from situating ourselves in history. Who benefits from this? A privileged minority, striving to invent a history that justifies the role of the ruling classes. Consider the final portraits by Frans Hals of the Regents and Regentesses of an Alms House. He was an old, destitute pauper, and they were the administrators of public charity. In their faces, we can see the drama of a man painting those who held power over him, an unforgettable contrast of lived experience that art history often explains away with formal analysis of “harmonious fusion” and “subtle modulations.”
A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power he embodies - what he is capable of doing to you or for you. A woman's presence, by contrast, expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her. She must continually watch herself, accompanied by her own image of herself. She is split in two: the surveyor and the surveyed. And the surveyor within her is male. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight. This dynamic is laid bare in the European tradition of the nude. Here, woman is the principal, ever-recurring subject. She is not naked as she is, but naked as the spectator sees her. The spectator is presumed to be a man, and everything is addressed to him.
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. Nudity is a form of dress, a disguise of skin and hair that can never be discarded. In paintings from *Susannah and the Elders* to *The Judgement of Paris*, the woman is an object of observation, judgment, and possession. She is depicted as supine, available, and aware of being looked at. The mirror in her hand is not a symbol of her vanity, but a tool that makes her connive in treating herself as a sight. There are exceptions, of course - paintings by Rembrandt or Rubens of women they loved. In these, the painter's personal vision is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator. He is forced to recognize himself as an outsider, witnessing a relationship to which he is not invited. These women are not nudes; they are naked.
The tradition of oil painting, from roughly 1500 to 1900, did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. It was an art form born to celebrate a new kind of wealth, one that found its sanction in the supreme buying power of money. The unique quality of oil paint is its ability to render the tangibility, texture, and lustre of things, to define the real as that which you can put your hands on. Holbein's painting of *The Ambassadors* is a masterpiece of this way of seeing. The eye moves from fur to silk, metal to wood, velvet to marble, and each surface appeals to the sense of touch. The men are surrounded by the stuff of the world, instruments of navigation and colonization that testify to their power to possess it.
This way of seeing permeates every genre of the tradition. Still-life paintings are simple demonstrations of what money can buy, where merchandise becomes the subject of art. Portraits of landowners, like Gainsborough's *Mr and Mrs Andrews*, depict a proprietary attitude not just towards each other, but towards the very land that surrounds them. Mythological paintings offered the ruling class a system of references for their own idealized behavior, classic guises to wear like garments. If the oil painting in its frame is like an imaginary window, it is less a window onto the world than a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.
In the cities where we now live, we are confronted by a new density of images. Publicity is the culture of the consumer society, and it speaks in the visual language inherited directly from oil painting. It uses the same gestures, the same romantic landscapes, the same stereotypes of women, and the same equation of material possessions with grace. A quoted work of art lends a product both the allure of wealth and the authority of culture. Color photography, like oil paint before it, plays upon the spectator's sense of acquiring the real thing.
But the function of publicity is profoundly different. The oil painting consolidated an owner's sense of his own value by showing him what he already possessed. Publicity, by contrast, works upon anxiety. It must make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with their present way of life. It proposes that we transform ourselves by buying something more. It offers an improved alternative to what we are. The happiness it promises is not pleasure, but the state of being envied by others. This is glamour.
Publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. It steals our love of ourselves as we are and offers it back to us for the price of a product. It remains credible not because it fulfills its promises, but because its fantasies are relevant to our daydreams. It fills the gap between what we are and what we would like to be. In doing so, it turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what to wear or drive takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity is the life of this culture, and at the same time, it is its dream, imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable. The entire art of the past has now become a political issue, because a people cut off from their own history is far less free to choose and to act.
