Time & Perspective Quote by John Berger

Publicity, for Berger, isn’t the glitter on capitalism; it’s the oxygen mask. The line snaps because it refuses to treat advertising as a mere business tactic and frames it as cultural metabolism: without a constant stream of images, promises, and “newness,” the system can’t keep desire ahead of satisfaction. Publicity doesn’t just inform you that a product exists. It manufactures the feeling that your current life is unfinished until you buy the missing piece.

Berger’s pivot - “and at the same time publicity is its dream” - is the slyest part. A dream is vivid, persuasive, and weightless; it doesn’t have to cash out in reality. Publicity operates the same way, staging a parallel world where happiness looks clean, bodies look effortless, and social status is purchasable. It sells not objects but upgraded selves, the fantasy of arrival. The subtext is bleak: capitalism survives by keeping people in a permanent state of almost. Almost attractive enough, almost secure enough, almost admired enough.

Context matters. Berger is writing from a late-20th-century Britain saturated with mass media and consumer aspiration, and he approaches images as an artist: not neutral reflections but active agents. His intent isn’t to scold individual shoppers; it’s to expose the system’s soft power. Publicity “dreams” on our behalf, then bills us for the privilege of chasing it.