The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin

• Change in the superstructure happens more slowly than in the
substructure
• Lithography
o Enabled graphic art to illustrate every day life
• Photography
o Freed the hand of the most important artistic functions: the eye
looking into the lens
o “To an even greater degree the work of the reproduced becomes
the work of art designed for reproducibility.” (p.224)
• Film/Sound
o Images become signs
Reproduction lacks the presence in time & space
• introduces the idea of the original / authenticity
• process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual
reproduction
• technical reproduction can re-contextualize the original
• authenticity / authority
o duration
o testimony to history which it experienced
o diminution of “aura”
• value
o cult value
o exhibition value
• portability of the artwork
o possibility to be read out of context
• is photography art?
o not an important question compared with the question of film
Film
• audience takes the position of the camera – which constantly shifts
• actor performs for the camera – not the audience
• art has left the world of “beautiful semblance”
• rise of the cult of the movie star
• metaphor of the reader as writer (people as actors)
• painter vs. cameraman
o painter as magician; cameraman as surgeon
o painter maintains distance from reality; cameraman penetrates its
web
o painter obtains total picture; camera made up from fragments
Mechanical Reproduction & the Masses (XII)
• “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the
sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.”
• “Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous
collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, fro
the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today.”
• “Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons,
there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in
their reception.”
Analysis (XIII)
• possible to analyze film more precisely than painting because it “can be
isolated more easily.”
• slowing down of film image
• “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis
to unconscious impulses.”
(XIV)
• “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a
demand which could be fully satisfied only later.”
o example: “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial and literary
means the effects which the public today seeks in film.”
• screen vs. painting
o painting invites the spectator to contemplation
o screen (movie frame) changes too frequently
ß “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have
been replaced by moving images.”
Distraction of Art (XV)
• “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of
art issues today in a new form.”
o “For the tasks which face human apparatus of perception at the
turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is
by contemplation alone. They are mastered by habit, under the
guidance of tactile appropriation.”

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