September 27, 2005

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is a reading response to an article by Walter Benjamin.

This week's reading continues last week's trend of going over my head. Unfortunately, I can only respond to what I understand, and so I'll give a pretty conservative reading here, sticking only to what I thought I understood.

Basically, art, the kind that's usually put in quotes, or called high art, or something similar, was originally developed in a very different kind of world than ours. This art (think paintings) had to be painstakingly crafted, usually by a single individual, usually taking a great deal of time. The work could only be displayed where it resided, meaning people had to come to see it. Meaning rich people saw it, and not very many of them, and that was it.

So a lot of kinds of art—paintings, sculptures, etc.—were originally developed in this context, where they were meant as single entities, to be shown to and appreciated by a select few only.

But the modern world has turned all that on its ear. We no longer have to share physical space with the original work of art to view it. An original is hardly unique anymore, for it can be reproduced (in some fashion or other) a limitless number of times. Benjamin also points out that film allows us, through the speeding up or slowing down of the reel, to see things—"art"—in a way that we as a species were heretofore completely unable to see.

I believe the author lays this point out to show how the context for traditional art no longer applies, but I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

It seems to me that there have been efforts made by modern-day artists, operating in the old-school mode (i.e., painting), to subvert the context-changing power of mechanical reproduction. One obvious way is in the way that prints are often numbered. This artificially limits the number of extant originals of a work of art. Also, theater seems to be an art form that has been largely immune to the sort of diluting effect of mechanical reproduction, for a play is something that is difficult to move from place to place (though not impossible), and it is impossible to recreate the ambience of the theater in any form.

The author also trots out the Dadaists, a group who, cognizant of the changes in the art world that reproduction was having, consciously created works of art that had no artistic, contemplative, or material value. They were anti-art.

Benjamin takes (to me) a severe left turn in the epilogue to his essay, in which he ruminates on the aesthetics of war. He positions war as a kind of logical extrapolation of art in the age of technology, and draws a parallel between struggles for changing property relations with the struggle of artists to carve out new plateaus in their art.

Posted September 27, 2005 12:34 AM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 3 | Permalink