A few quick thoughts on Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), which I’m leading a discussion on tomorrow. Going to avoid some of the overtly political stuff, even though I think it’s extremely interesting, simply because the class is more about our current visual culture. Which isn’t to say I don’t think it ties in - it does, and heavily - but there could be books written on any section of his essay (and probably have been) and I just have to go with what grabbed me quickly, and start the discussion with that.

General Response

This article is full of some of the most important observations on art and media in the early 1900s - and many of the concerns spoken of take on an almost exponential increase in relevance as we crash into the 21^st century. It’s very hard to react to all the ideas in the essay in a short space, but I’ll try to cover some of my thoughts on several matters.

Walter Benjamin wrote as it was becoming easier to technically reproduce works of art (and reality) after the invention of photography, and more recently to him, film and sound film. Now, with the ubiquitous digital file, copies of media are made with a key stroke or click - barely a thought. A recent blog post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation talked about the 2002 Darknet DRM assumptions (Summed up - 1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying. 2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so. 3. Users will share copies as long as they are connected by high-bandwidth channels.) in 2008 - they concluded that not only were they true, but the third is being surpassed as hard drive capacity is reaching a point where it is easy to comprehend people passing a collection of modern music in its entirety hand to hand on portable disks.

The political implications of Benjamin’s article may have seemed radical at the time, then perhaps impossible as it aged from the 50s through the 80s, but are now starting to regain some relevance, though not in a way he could have predicted. Information (and all media included in this) is starting to flatline in value under a capitalistic system. While it still has obvious educational value and value understood by what it took to produce it, there is almost universal confusion over what the actual monetary and trade value of information will be in the near future. Who can owns something that can be infinitely copied - exactly, with no difference between original and copy - with no damage to the original?

Benjamin talks of the reaction of the masses towards art, once it becomes mechanically reproduced and widely available. He thought it was against the nature of painting to be consumed by the masses at one time. However it is exactly the nature of the jpeg - easily dispersed, with control and no trail to follow. In a surprising turn, though, film has turned into video, in turn into youtube - and what was at the start a spectacle for large groups of people has become a strange private/public experience: anyone can see a video, but it is often viewed as an audience of one. There is no crowd to help shape the response of the viewer, unless the idiotic comments on the videos can be counted.

Questions and thoughts, in no particular order:

1) Benjamin mentions that the cameraman is like the surgeon, inside and a part of things while he cuts. The viewer, he says, is offered “an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment” through film. Do you think this is true? There is an obvious suspension of disbelief while watching a film (at least a good one), but as highly media savvy members of society, perhaps we are always aware on some level of the manipulation of equipment and artists? Does a higher level of digital effects in film serve to increase or decrease this “aspect of reality?”

2) Benjamin feels that film may move too quickly to allow for serious contemplation - unlike painting. Is this less true now, for those of us who have never known a world without film? Or is it more true, with Hollywood constantly employing new, more violent (structurally) ways of trying to grab our attention?

3) Is there still any appreciation or understanding of the “aura” of art? Most people only know paintings through reproduction - it is quite possible that many art fans have never seen any painting in person. Can a poster share in the original’s aura? Does it have anything to do with the subject or vision of the subject - or must it only be carried by the physical presence of an original - a heavy concept in itself?