No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature.

Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was

Adriaen Brouwer was the only exceptional ‘genre’ painter.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer – even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.

(Men in seventeenth-century Holland wore their hats on the side of their heads in order to be thought of as adventurous and pleasure-loving.

This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself.

Publicity principally addressed to the working class tends to promise a personal transformation through the function of the particular product it is selling (Cinderella); middle-class publicity promises a transformation of relationships through a general atmosphere created by an ensemble of products (The Enchanted Palace).