Envy Being Envied
We are surrounded by publicity images more than ever in our modern life. We are told these images are a competitive medium which ultimately benefits society. However each image only confirms and enhances its ‘competitor’. Beneath the surface of various bright colours and well set typography lies the same general proposal: that our lives can be transformed through consumption. Every advertisement speaks in the same universal language, coming together to form a dominant narrative. Publicity cannot sell us the real object of pleasure, instead we are offered an image of ourselves made desirable by the commodity. “Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour”. The buyer is meant to envy themselves as they will become if they buy the product, transformed by the product into an object of envy. The publicity image steals our love of ourselves as we are, and offers it back to us for the price of the product. The spectator buyer is made to feel dissatisfied, not with society as a whole, but with his own individual life within it. Publicity offers to sell him an improved alternative. The individual lives in a contradiction of what he is and what he would like to be. This gap is mirrored by what publicity actually materially offers and the transformed future it promises.The commodity promises to bridge the gap of dissatisfaction, but instead, it sells us an illusion, dreams of an ideal self that remains out of reach.
CMYK Screenprint
Southbank 310gsm
29.7cm x 42cm
