Mechanical Reproduction By Walter Benjamin | The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Table of Contents

Introduction

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has become one of the landmark essays in the field of Cultural theory. Its first edition was published in German in 1935.

This essay is part of a series of works by Benjamin on the relationships between art, culture, and politics, which were collected and edited after his death by his colleague Hannah Arendt in the text Illuminations. Written in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany, the essay explores themes like Technology and Artistic Production, Depictions of Reality in Art, and Art as a Political Form.

About Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. He was little acclaim during his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem.

Among Benjamin’s best-known works are the essays “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.

Analysis Of The Essay

Benjamin opens his essay by stating his purpose in the text: to set out a series of concepts about the theory of art that will be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (218). Benjamin states that he will base his discussion not on classical Marxist predictions about how art will be made, but rather on how it is being made at the time of his writing. He asserts that typical modes of assessing artwork, such as “creativity and genius” (218), lend themselves to a Fascist interpretation of artwork. He wishes to indicate a series of concepts for evaluating art that are anti-Fascist.

According to Benjamin, art is valued in two separate ways: the cult, and the exhibition. The cult tradition features ceremonial objects meant to be valued simply for their existence, while exhibition value stems from a piece of art being on view. Contemporary art, Benjamin argues, is valued entirely for its exhibition value, and thus art is being created with entirely new functions and purposes.

Ideas in Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

• Benjamin on Museums and their Role in Commodifying and Neutralizing Art

In a museum, art follows a particular logic. It forms a coherent flow with the other objects which are displayed and exhibited. Private museums for example serve as a symbol of the wealth and culture of the person who owns it.

Public museums also serve to showcase the abundance of culture of the particular country in which it is displayed. Collection and accumulation of works of art isn’t random but it serves to tell a story of state or private power.

The museum functions like a supermarket accumulating, organizing and displaying whole artistic movements as bit-sized consumable commodities so that the individual can gain some cultural points by knowing about them.

• Reproduction, Context, and the Artwork’s Aura

While technological reproduction cannot reproduce the specific place and time in which the original existed, it can detach it from its original traditional context. The context is artificially multiplied. Viewing the work next to another work on a museum wall is a different experience from viewing it in the form of a sticker on a car or as part of a movie.

Reproducibility touches upon the essential core of the artwork, its authenticity. For Benjamin ‘the unique value of the “authentic” work of art always has its basis in ritual’ and this basis in ritual is precisely what is threatened by reproduction, which can recontextualise the work of art, emancipating it from the chains of its rituals.

Benjamin sees revolutionary potential in reproduction. It transposes the basis of the artwork from the ritual to the political. The mode of human perception is itself situated in history and in “our” history, it is characterized by a diminishing of the aura of the work of art. The aura for Benjamin is

“A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be”.

• The Role of Photography

Regarding photography, the precursor to film, Benjamin says that rather than ask whether photography was considered art—which many critics did, at the time of photography’s invention—one should have instead asked whether photography changed the entire nature of art. This change to the fundamentals of art is at the heart of Benjamin’s contentions regarding both photography and now film.

Kandinsky is one such example of this evolution of art. He is cited as the father of abstract paintings. “Abstract” however doesn’t fully capture what was going on. Art didn’t simply become non-concrete but it became so in order to escape the gaze of the camera. It started to look deeper for motives, new ways of expression, and new ways of speaking. It also entered into communication with itself, a communication that wasn’t readily accessible to the masses. This was in contrast with photography, which Benjamin asserts started to be evermore commodified with time.

• Fascism, capitalism, and the (De)Politicization of Art

For Benjamin, art is fundamentally political and as such it should be situated in history. The ruling classes convey a notion of art that is tied to tradition and unchanging. It has a unique irreducible aura that can not be duplicated.

Through reproduction, the work of art is democratized. Reproduction threatened the values of the status quo which were based precisely on the unchangeability of the work of art, its persistence and ahistorical essence.

Benjamin also attacks futurism and its glorification of war and domination. Fascism forms a mythology of itself, relying on a reactionary imagination of values that are mobilized against any progressive forces, social or economic. Fascism relies on art which can be said to be objectively good because it reflects what fascists value.

“The destruction of the aura is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduction.”

• Walter Benjamin on the Weight of History

History is driven by its inner contradictions, the tension that exists in the very fabric of society: the tension between a worker and an owner, between the state and the masses, between art and the artist, between art’s history and its progress. Benjamin’s reading of history is a critique of those thinkers who have reduced historical materialism to a deterministic, physicalist theory by appropriating and magnifying its most vulgar aspects.

In the Fascist conception of history, subjugation is glorified and hierarchies romanticized through art. Art itself becomes a tool, not of expression but one of exerting power from above. The basic structure of history as conceived by fascism is that of a harmonious past where people followed traditional moral values until the ‘other’ infiltrated said society and started ruining it from within. Fascism is ultimately a conspiracy theory that is entangled in its mysticism which can explain all events as following from the infiltration of the other.

On another hand, Benjamin’s claim that art has lost its original purpose, which was experiencing beauty and appreciating creativity, is proven right over the years. All forms of art in our age are used to serve various purposes other than the authentic ones. They are utilized to brainwash the masses into believing in new ideas, hating certain ethnic groups, or even buying specific products. Thus, art nowadays is a dangerous tool in the very wrong hands. People must be selective when it comes to exposing themself to any kind of artwork in our century.

The essay concludes with Benjamin asserting that this destruction of the aura has ultimately alienated mankind from himself, so much so that “it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”.

Conclusion

Thus the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” examines the fundamental change brought to the world of art by the twentieth century: the easy facilitation of reproduction. The value of artworks in the past was primarily centred upon their unique status.

The value of any piece of work was inextricably tied to the aura of its authenticity. With the ability to more easily reproduce works of art, art lost much of its ritualistic significance and its value shifted from the aura of authenticity to its value as a reproducible product.

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