Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image

Objects are all around us – and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not just an object of value but a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us.

Our relation to things, Coccia, argues in this provocative book, is what...