The cult value of it, so groundedness in tradition, got emancipated through exhibiting it and further enhanced through reproduction. Art bears a strong socio-cultural importance, however, it is utilised through mechanical reproduction in order to function politically. In a society in which distances are aimed to be minimised and masses brought together, the decay of the “aura” is formed through the approximation of reality to the masses and vice versa. The mechanical reproduction of art detaches it from its origin, it limits the naturally unique existence and it leads to a diminishment of the artwork´s authority over the spectator.
What Benjamin points out here is in its essence a shift in power relations and streams of cause and effect from the artwork towards the observer of it. The art piece´s authenticity, scope and authority in itself are limited through the ability of these techniques to interfere with the spectator, either by providing him with material he could not perceive by himself or by actively changing elements of the artwork in the course of reproduction. Mechanical reproduction takes away from what he calls the “aura” of an artwork - the unique qualia of its existence in time and space and the accompanying distance between the observer and the piece. In his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin is tapping into these concepts by dubbing the mechanisation of art reproduction as a somewhat change in paradigm in terms of art theory. The Effect of Mechanical Reproduction on Art What is our relationship with art? How does the dawn of great innovations transform our perception of the qualia of things and in which ways does this alteration turn us, the spectator, into utilising art as a form of commodity? Does this change imply alterations in how we experience our existence through art? ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p.↑ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp.History would be the attempt to make sense of the continual passage of time, but history is defeated by the same force that makes it impossible to fulfill all our dreams of what Fitzgerald calls an “orgastic future.” Time, progress, history-all are forces that constantly transform our lives and that we cannot halt or even adequately represent. Scott Fitzgerald’s modern Americans in their boats are ceaselessly borne into the past at the end of The Great Gatsby, Benjamin’s angel of history is irresistibly propelled into the future. In Benjamin’s interpretation of the painting, the angel is looking at us, the human beings who move through time.
This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. But a storm is blowing from Paradise it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. Benjamin writes of Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus” ( 1920), interpreting its central figure as the angel of history, whose “face is turned toward the past”: In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” ( 1940), the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin presents a striking image of the fear that the individual human being had lost control of time in a modernity characterized by the rapid succession of world-changing historical events.
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