2MED443 Approaches to Media

1. 2MED443Approaches to Media Week Five Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art

2. Session Topics • ‘Aura’ and Authenticity • Copy and Original • Art as Ritual • The Critical Consumer

3. ‘Aura’ and Authenticity Even though Walter Benjamin was associated with The Frankfurt School, he was not as pessimistic about mass culture as Adorno and Horkheimer (see Week 4). In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (orig. 1936), Benjamin saw the ‘popular’ media of photography and film as bringing about a deep redefinition of art, an overturning of traditional aesthetic values, by undermining the “aura” of the unique object. Mechanical Reproduction “emancipates” the object from an archaic dependence on ritual, or its cult status…

4. ‘Aura’ and Authenticity Elitist One Off Democratic Mass Reproduction Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

5. ‘Aura’ and Authenticity “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics” (1999: 218).

6. ‘Aura’ and Authenticity The nature of technological development transforms the production and consumption of works of art, and the modes of experiencing those works of art. The means of technical reproduction destroys the ‘aura’ of the work of art, undermining its authority through reproduction and liberating its work from history.

7. Copy and Original New means of technical reproduction like photography and film, bring out aspects of the original that escape the naked eye, thus exposing to the viewer the inner life of the work.

8. Copy and Original These new means of reproduction reduce the distance between the object and its viewer, as it can bring the copy into situations which were previously inconceivable for historical and cultural reasons. These changed conditions undermine the unique existence of the original work of art and call into question its authenticity. This allows the possibility of new forms of art

9. For example, collage art… Hannah Höch (1919-1920) Cut with a Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Era of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture

10. Copy and Original This change in the status of the work of art holds democratic potential in its liberation of the historical elitism of art practices and in the technological liberation of the viewer. In penetrating the aura of the work of art, Benjamin draws attention to the historical basis of this notion, to the mystique of authenticity surrounding the original work of art and its basis in shared social experience.

11. Art as Ritual The sacred, ritualistic dimension of the work of art is undermined by the processes of cultural and technological transformation, and replaced with a new mode of perceiving, of exhibiting rather than of cult status. Film in particular produces not the individual viewer but the collective subject who approaches the work not in a spirit of adulation, but of critique and disinterestedness. This is the ‘shock effect’ of film.

12. The Critical Consumer The new kind of viewer is ‘distracted’ by film, rather than concentrating in the traditional manner, and that distraction is positive in that it confronts the viewer with the contradictions between the work and its reception.

13. References Benjamin, W. (1999, orig. 1936) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn), London: Pimlico, pp. 211-245.

14. Seminar Questions Spend 5 minutes discussing each question: 1. “From a photographic negative… one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense”. Do you agree? 2. Is the ‘democratisation’ of art through new technologies a good thing?