Creativity Quote by John Berger

Glamour, for Berger, isn’t a sparkle you possess so much as a social technology you activate. The line cuts against the comforting myth that glamour is “just taste” or “natural beauty.” It’s relational, engineered to be seen from below. Without envy circulating through a culture like background radiation, glamour has nothing to feed on: no ache, no comparison, no sense that someone else’s life is the life you should have had.

The phrasing is clinical on purpose. “Cannot exist” turns glamour into a dependent organism, not an art form. “Personal social envy” is even sharper: envy isn’t merely private insecurity; it’s structurally produced by living among ranked lives. Berger’s subtext is accusatory but measured: if glamour thrives, it’s because society is organized to make people feel lacking, then offer images of “having” as consolation.

Context matters. Berger wrote at a moment when mass media, advertising, and celebrity were fusing into a single visual regime, where images didn’t just reflect reality but trained desire. Coming from an artist and critic attentive to how we learn to look, he’s describing a feedback loop: the camera elevates certain bodies, homes, and lifestyles; the audience internalizes that hierarchy; envy becomes common; glamour gains power; the hierarchy hardens.

What makes the sentence work is its refusal to moralize in obvious ways. It doesn’t scold the envious; it indicts the conditions that make envy “common and widespread.” Glamour isn’t harmless fantasy here. It’s a symptom of inequality, and a tool that keeps people chasing the feeling of being chosen.