Brace yourself as this paper is a difficult one to gasp your head around. Who ever said the previous tutorials for New Communication Technology were too easy is going to be the persecuted… Just joking. But seriously.
Walter Benjamin’s paper titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” contains many influential ideas that has shaped cultural and media theories for years. It was produced in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. This can be applied to today’s contemporary digital media which compose of mass media like posters, magazines with photography, radio and cinema. Benjamin referred to this aspect of mechanical reproduction as liberating. He argued that techniques of reproduction utilized in photography and film have a liberating potential because of their ‘destructive, cathartic… liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.’ This refers to the current portrayal of contemporary digital media and ridicules the progressing revolutionize of art. Art has changed from a time when it was only produced by artists who were skilled professionals in their class. It is now subdivided between anyone that owns a computer and can create things digitally through music, images and video. In an age of digital manipulation it comes as no surprise that we question the authenticity of these of art. Benjamin considers the idea of an artwork having an ‘aura’. He used the word ‘aura’ to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. Through this term, he uses it to describe a sense of profound appreciation for something that can only be triggered by a true and original piece of art and that anything reproduced or altered mechanically loses this sense of authenticity and therefore holds no true ‘aura’. For example a photo; it loses all artistic value because it is merely an image reproduced by a machine and loses the requirement of skill from the artist and is basically just a creation of technology rather than human talent. So therefore from a photographic negative that can make any number of prints, it makes so sense to ask for the ‘authentic’ print.
Digital photographic reproduction is a different case. To digitize something is essentially to de-materialise it, to reduce it to an entirely quantifiable binary string. The art is quantified and can be reproduced or viewed. This has the same kind of revolutionary impact on art that photography has. Another implication, in digital technology, is that it is essentially open to exposure in the sense that anyone can possibly alter it and redistribute it. The idea of ownership has modernized, and Benjamin’s idea of ‘authenticity’ is once again annihilated completely. So does digital art have an ‘aura’? According to Benjamin, this aura inheres no in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. ‘Aura’ is therefore a suggestion of art’s traditional association with primitive and feudal structures of power. Consequently, with the arrival of mechanical reproduction the experience of art is freed from place structure and instead brought under the control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the ‘aura’.
"For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Benjamin argued that the withering of the aura was a more complicated historical development, an ambiguous force that also had the potential for democratizing both access to cultural objects and a critical attitude toward them. "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics."
Walter Benjamin’s paper titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” contains many influential ideas that has shaped cultural and media theories for years. It was produced in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. This can be applied to today’s contemporary digital media which compose of mass media like posters, magazines with photography, radio and cinema. Benjamin referred to this aspect of mechanical reproduction as liberating. He argued that techniques of reproduction utilized in photography and film have a liberating potential because of their ‘destructive, cathartic… liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.’ This refers to the current portrayal of contemporary digital media and ridicules the progressing revolutionize of art. Art has changed from a time when it was only produced by artists who were skilled professionals in their class. It is now subdivided between anyone that owns a computer and can create things digitally through music, images and video. In an age of digital manipulation it comes as no surprise that we question the authenticity of these of art. Benjamin considers the idea of an artwork having an ‘aura’. He used the word ‘aura’ to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. Through this term, he uses it to describe a sense of profound appreciation for something that can only be triggered by a true and original piece of art and that anything reproduced or altered mechanically loses this sense of authenticity and therefore holds no true ‘aura’. For example a photo; it loses all artistic value because it is merely an image reproduced by a machine and loses the requirement of skill from the artist and is basically just a creation of technology rather than human talent. So therefore from a photographic negative that can make any number of prints, it makes so sense to ask for the ‘authentic’ print.
Digital photographic reproduction is a different case. To digitize something is essentially to de-materialise it, to reduce it to an entirely quantifiable binary string. The art is quantified and can be reproduced or viewed. This has the same kind of revolutionary impact on art that photography has. Another implication, in digital technology, is that it is essentially open to exposure in the sense that anyone can possibly alter it and redistribute it. The idea of ownership has modernized, and Benjamin’s idea of ‘authenticity’ is once again annihilated completely. So does digital art have an ‘aura’? According to Benjamin, this aura inheres no in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. ‘Aura’ is therefore a suggestion of art’s traditional association with primitive and feudal structures of power. Consequently, with the arrival of mechanical reproduction the experience of art is freed from place structure and instead brought under the control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the ‘aura’.
"For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Benjamin argued that the withering of the aura was a more complicated historical development, an ambiguous force that also had the potential for democratizing both access to cultural objects and a critical attitude toward them. "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics."
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